Reviews with content warning for Mental illness - The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood; Youth; Dependency

Reviews tagging 'Mental illness'

The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood; Youth; Dependency by Tove Ditlevsen

14 reviews

lagaialettrice's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

4.0

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calistria's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

5.0

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padancer's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

5.0

Prawdziwość, naturalność w tej opowieści jest dobijająco surowa, opowiedziana prawie jakby to była trzecia osoba obserwująca historię, ale to narratorka ma duży dystans do swojego życia. Bardzo smutna historia, ale potrzebna i ponadczasowa

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okapipo's review

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emotional informative reflective sad tense slow-paced

4.5

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kstolecki's review

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challenging dark emotional sad medium-paced

5.0

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milkfran's review

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challenging dark slow-paced

4.75

I deliberately chose Tove Ditlevsen’s Copenhagen Trilogy before I went on a recent trip there: the lives of working class writers always interest me (aka: how do they do it)
and I thought it would be nice to add some literary background to my holiday but I wasn’t prepared for how much it would worm its way under my skin.

Firstly, I’d definitely recommend reading Childhood, Youth and Dependency in one go, as a whole memoir rather than three separate books.
I’ve seen from other people’s reviews that they found Ditlevsen difficult to warm to as a narrator but I enjoyed being in her company and the clear, detached way she describes her life without any justification or excuses. I’m reluctant to ascribe diagnoses to historical figures but the way she talks about experience life in such a detached and lonely way makes me wonder that if she’d been alive today she’d describe herself as neurodivergent. Long passages of description about the beauty of other women certainly gives queer vibes too… 👀
As a queer neurodivergent teen I’d have painfully copied this quote from the second chapter into my diary in a heartbeat:
“… if you don’t know such a shortcut, childhood must be endured and trudged through hour by hour, through and absolutely interminable number of years. Only death can free you from it, so you think a lot about death, and picture it as a white-robed, friendly angel who some night will kiss your eyelids so that they never will open again. I always think that when I’m grown-up my mother will finally like me…” [p.28]

Incidentally, people who describe their childhood/teenage years as the best years of their life are always people I’m wary of. Not that Ditlevsen shakes off her childhood and relishes adulthood as an opportunity to to make the best choices (in the end, which of us does?). Still clearly emotionally vulnerable and disempowered she attaches herself to the first men who come along and show interest in her writing as a desperate way to escape her every day life and who can blame her?
She never directly draws the parallels herself between her childhood experiences and string of disappointing men and later addictions but it would be difficult not to read the first two books as a rationalisation of the third.
A few of the books I’ve read recently, Demon Copperhead and Young Mungo deal with addiction and it’s a theme I seem to be drawn to reading about but the Copenhagen trilogy is neither a woe-is-me victim memoir or an angry polemic about the morality of addiction, it occupies a sort of grey area which makes it so refreshing to read.
For a poet, her prose is clear, sharp and immediate as if the events are happening as she’s describing them but also dulled with the detached wisdom of time.

Tove Ditlevsen is more well known in Denmark than she is here in the UK and it seems to be these new translations and release of the trilogy as one book that’s sparked renewed interest in her work as ‘the greatest Danish writer you’ve never heard of’ according to the review by Boyd Tonkin in The Spectator and I’d love for more people to read this one so I can scratch the itch of the passionate need to talk to people about her that reading this book has sparked…

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