Scan barcode
okapipo's review against another edition
4.5
Graphic: Toxic relationship, Physical abuse, Classism, Abortion, Domestic abuse, Cancer, Adult/minor relationship, Death, Medical content, Drug abuse, Addiction, and Mental illness
Moderate: Alcohol, Death, Terminal illness, and Pregnancy
milkfran's review against another edition
4.75
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…
Graphic: Abortion, Medical content, Addiction, Sexual assault, Mental illness, and Medical trauma
Minor: War
ldawson's review against another edition
5.0
Graphic: Rape, Pregnancy, Drug abuse, Drug use, Addiction, Infidelity, Alcohol, Mental illness, Medical content, Toxic relationship, Sexism, and Abortion
odpeppiatt's review against another edition
3.5
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.”
Graphic: Abortion, Addiction, Suicidal thoughts, Schizophrenia/Psychosis , Drug use, Alcoholism, Misogyny, Medical content, Infidelity, and Drug abuse
lghrndn's review against another edition
4.0
Graphic: Abortion, Drug abuse, Drug use, Toxic relationship, and Addiction
Moderate: Infidelity, Mental illness, Domestic abuse, and Medical content
Minor: Pregnancy, Adult/minor relationship, and Cancer
chezler24's review against another edition
4.0
Moderate: Addiction, Medical content, Abortion, Death, and Pregnancy
Minor: Medical trauma, Schizophrenia/Psychosis , Sexual content, Terminal illness, and War
emilycm's review against another edition
5.0
Graphic: Abortion, Addiction, Infidelity, Medical content, Toxic relationship, and Medical trauma
okarenhelena's review against another edition
4.75
Graphic: Abortion, Addiction, Drug abuse, and Drug use
Moderate: Toxic relationship, Toxic friendship, Cancer, and Eating disorder
Minor: Mental illness, Schizophrenia/Psychosis , Infidelity, War, Abandonment, Self harm, Pregnancy, Misogyny, Medical content, Alcohol, Alcoholism, Antisemitism, Chronic illness, Medical trauma, Classism, and Vomit
beatrizstg's review against another edition
5.0
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.
Graphic: Abortion, Addiction, Alcohol, Drug abuse, Drug use, Emotional abuse, Gaslighting, Medical content, Mental illness, Miscarriage, Suicidal thoughts, and Toxic relationship