okapipo's review

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emotional informative reflective sad tense slow-paced

4.5


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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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ldawson's review

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dark emotional reflective sad tense medium-paced

5.0


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odpeppiatt's review

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dark emotional reflective sad tense fast-paced

3.5

“I can see Morten’s angular honest face before me, and I remember his poem: I have known death since I was a boy. It’s so strange, I say, how he wrote so much about death. I know, says Tutti, calming down a little. It’s as if he knew that he wouldn’t be allowed to live.”

In the same vein (no pun intended), it’s as if Tove Ditlevsen wrote so much about this far-fetched glimmer of freedom throughout each era of her life because she knew when she finally grabbed hold of it, it would disintegrate through her fingers. Throughout her childhood and youth, she dreams of being a writer (“I always dreamed of finding a person, just one, to whom I could show my poems and who would praise them.”), finding true love (“But I’ve begun to long for the intimate closeness with another human being that is called love. I long for love without knowing what it is. I think that I’ll find it when I no longer live at home. And the man I love will be different from anyone else.”), and having a generally conventional life (“Ebbe asks, Why do you want to be normal and regular? Everyone knows you’re not. I don’t know how to answer him, but I have wanted that as far back as I can remember.”). In every stage of her life, she sets her desperate hope of happiness on the future, while being consciously miserable and romanticizing her past. In the first installment of the trilogy, Childhood, she writes, “Childhood is long and narrow like a coffin, and you can’t get out of it on your own. It’s there all the time and everyone can see it just as clearly as you can see Pretty Ludvig’s harelip,” only to reminisce on that time of her life in the second, Youth, saying, “most of the time I find this life intolerably boring and recall with sorrow my variable and eventful childhood.”
This Faustian cycle continues to repeat itself until she is met with the amalgamation of her greatest desires: she is a famous writer married to a man who loves her with a child they share— the epitome of conventional bliss. But this formula for bliss produced an opposite effect. Ditlevsen moved from marriage to marriage, ultimately drawing into herself and having to endure two shifty abortions because women’s healthcare was so scarce in this regard. She moved forward from both procedures without the fetuses, but the latter burdened her with a crippling addiction to narcotics. In the end, the only moments that offered her any semblance of freedom were distorted through the haze of Demerol, and even those were fleeting and accompanied excruciating consequences.
In this beautifully written, enthralling glimpse into the life of a young woman in Denmark during WWII, Ditlevsen exposes the evasiveness of freedom and the trouble with happiness (pun intended).

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lghrndn's review against another edition

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dark emotional funny reflective sad slow-paced

4.0


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chezler24's review

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dark emotional reflective sad slow-paced

4.0

I was not previously familiar with this author's works prior to reading this series of memoirs by her so it was interesting to see this person's life from youth going into adulthood. At moments, it was hard for me to fully connect with Ditlevsen and her choices; however, this could easily be explained by generational and cultural (and honestly just personal) differences. It was interesting to see the development of a woman writer and a poet as she had to deal with a poor upbringing, difficulties being taken seriously, and the expectations of a woman/mother. The turn at the end with the addiction and rehab kind of caught me off guard. Up until then Tove had been able to handle and work through any difficulties, but this particular thing (exacerbated by her husband's psychosis) really hampered her writing and overall quality of life until she was able to find a more stable sense of recovery. Collectively, this is a raw, intimate look into the life of an individual.   

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emilycm's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective sad tense medium-paced

5.0

with this being my introduction to ditlevsen's writing and life, i am certainly going to explore more of her other work now extensively. there's something so captivating about this set of memoirs, split into three appropriate sections, and i have so many words of how i feel about it. ditlevsen writes with a raw, unapologetic nature that's rough around the edges, but tender and vulnerable in the center. the feeling of this escalates by the third act, dependency, and i felt that everything was just spilling off the page, as if i was in the room watching this woman's life unfold; it's remarkably heartbreaking and beautiful all at once, and i am entirely enamored with her perspective and thought on these experiences she dealt with. there's beauty, pain, and the authentic experience of broken pieces of a life desperately trying to come together written so hauntingly. read this; it will change you.

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okarenhelena's review

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dark emotional funny inspiring reflective sad tense medium-paced

4.75


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beatrizstg's review

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense medium-paced

5.0

wow. what a journey this book has led me into.

Tove's life is incredibly sad and fascinating, her childhood, the loneliness, the lovers and husbands. the way she was abused mentally and physically (with drugs). the last third of this book is a rougher one, but brilliant.

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