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3.96 AVERAGE
3.96 AVERAGE
dark
emotional
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Ditlevsen’s writing is captivating but I preferred her memoir series to this novella as they both hold similar themes.
Gonna take a long break from sad housewife/mental hospital content after this one. Great if you’re into The Bell Jar, Girl,Interrupted, or Woman Destroyed.
Gonna take a long break from sad housewife/mental hospital content after this one. Great if you’re into The Bell Jar, Girl,Interrupted, or Woman Destroyed.
dark
emotional
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
“Reality disappeared behind her like someone on a railway platform as the train pulls away”—wow! A surreal whirlwind dip into a marvelously unstable mind. This was my first Ditlevsen and while I occasionally found her writing a little overwrought, I think some of the clunkiness can be attributed to translation. Either way, this was a fascinating short read full of incredible similes and jarring imagery. My fav sentence: “Hope moved like gentle, melodic sentences through her body where the terror had lain down to rest like a dog in its basket.” Like COME ON wow
trist læsning der stiller seriøse spørgsmålstegn ved effektiviteten i det danske psykiatriske behandlingsforløb. ihvertfald i 60'erne.
dark
emotional
reflective
tense
medium-paced
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
All things considered, his strength lay in his lack of imagination. He couldn't see with other people's eyes and couldn't feel with their nerves.
challenging
dark
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
"Slowly the terrors were stretched out between the small nails of routine, and sometimes it was possible to regard them as something outside of herself. Then a faint, tolerable sense of relief would appear, which she had to hide as if it were a stolen object that she didn't dare keep for very long."
These four stars for The Faces is no slant toward Tove Ditlevsen, piggybacking this read after the Copenhagen Trilogy made it difficult to rate this objectively. As in her other works, The Faces is an eloquent piece of autofiction even with its disturbing subject matter. With searing prose and elegiac allure, The Faces is a claustrophobic mental mess. From the suicide of her husband's mistress to the housekeeper corrupting her family, her suicide attempt and hearing voices in the toilet grate and pillow speakers in the hospital, the main character Lise's descent into hallucinatory psychosis is nothing short of distorted and frightening beauty. It's hard to tell if Tove Ditlevsen is a master writer or extremely vulnerable about her truths and after reading The Faces and The Copenhagen Trilogy and researching so of her personal story, I choose to believe she is both. She has an uncanny ability to blur the lines between memoir and fiction, making it impossible to not feel empathy and distress in relating to the narrator. This month Tove Ditlevsen has found a fan in me and I can't wait to get into her short story collection.
"Reality only exists in your mind. Things would be much better for you if you understood that. It has no objective existence."
"She had accepted her new, fragile reality the way a box accepts a lid that only fits if it expands and makes a great effort. That's the way things went, and she could only hope that nothing else would change."
"The truth is just as irritating as a hangnail. Have you ever known anyone who has derived the least benefit from the truth?"
"But if she revealed her coldness and egotism and told him what had happened behind the torture grating in the bathroom, it wouldn't have any reality for him - not the way it would for her for all eternity."
"Sometimes you do something to another person and afterward you're not the same. You do it in order to save yourself. And what you previously thought was the most important thing in the world isn't very meaningful anymore."
"Life consisted of a series of minute, imperceptible events, and you could lose control if you overlooked a single one of them."
"I'm with the insane, she thought, and her will to survive shot up inside her like a clear flame. It was a matter of preserving her sanity, then they couldn't seriously harm her in any way."
These four stars for The Faces is no slant toward Tove Ditlevsen, piggybacking this read after the Copenhagen Trilogy made it difficult to rate this objectively. As in her other works, The Faces is an eloquent piece of autofiction even with its disturbing subject matter. With searing prose and elegiac allure, The Faces is a claustrophobic mental mess. From the suicide of her husband's mistress to the housekeeper corrupting her family, her suicide attempt and hearing voices in the toilet grate and pillow speakers in the hospital, the main character Lise's descent into hallucinatory psychosis is nothing short of distorted and frightening beauty. It's hard to tell if Tove Ditlevsen is a master writer or extremely vulnerable about her truths and after reading The Faces and The Copenhagen Trilogy and researching so of her personal story, I choose to believe she is both. She has an uncanny ability to blur the lines between memoir and fiction, making it impossible to not feel empathy and distress in relating to the narrator. This month Tove Ditlevsen has found a fan in me and I can't wait to get into her short story collection.
"Reality only exists in your mind. Things would be much better for you if you understood that. It has no objective existence."
"She had accepted her new, fragile reality the way a box accepts a lid that only fits if it expands and makes a great effort. That's the way things went, and she could only hope that nothing else would change."
"The truth is just as irritating as a hangnail. Have you ever known anyone who has derived the least benefit from the truth?"
"But if she revealed her coldness and egotism and told him what had happened behind the torture grating in the bathroom, it wouldn't have any reality for him - not the way it would for her for all eternity."
"Sometimes you do something to another person and afterward you're not the same. You do it in order to save yourself. And what you previously thought was the most important thing in the world isn't very meaningful anymore."
"Life consisted of a series of minute, imperceptible events, and you could lose control if you overlooked a single one of them."
"I'm with the insane, she thought, and her will to survive shot up inside her like a clear flame. It was a matter of preserving her sanity, then they couldn't seriously harm her in any way."