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foggy_rosamund 's review for:
The Danish Girl
by David Ebershoff
A fictionalised account of one of the first transgender women to receive gender affirmation surgery. The film version of the same name is probably more famous than the book: I haven't seen it, but I believe that it is awful: casting a cis male actor as a trans woman was inexcusable. When I looked for reviews of the book online by trans people, I could only find reviews of the film -- I'd be very interested to read a trans person's perspective on the book itself.
This account is heavily fictionalised, changing various aspects of Lili's life, including her wife, Greta's, lesbianism, and aspects of her relationships with other people. There are many places where I thought the novel worked, though, particularly in the first two thirds: Ebershoff writes beautifully about places and landscape, and evokes the complicated ways in which we relate to other people. He gives a lot of space to Greta's character development, and her relationship to Lili, and to Lili's male identity, Einar. His prose feels laboured at times, which I think is down to this being a first novel, but in many aspects it succeeds, particularly in the way Ebershoff captures interpersonal tension, affection, and internal conflict. Ebershoff depicts Lili as feeling like she is two different people: that Einar is one aspect of her personality which disappears when she becomes Lili. This isn't an experience I've heard trans people describe, but given that Lili is living at a time when she believes no one else is like her, and has no words to describe how she feels, I can imagine her coming up with this particular way to explain her experience to herself.
Historically, Lili is probably the second person to receive gender affirmation surgery. Ebershoff describes her surgeries as gruelling, which I'm sure they were, but I felt the way he wrote about Lili's physical pain could be gratuitous and at times strongly othering. The sections following Lili through her surgeries were the clumsiest parts of the book. Mostly I was impressed with Ebershoff's writing style, and his insight into historical characters. However, because he's writing as a cis man about a trans woman, the mistakes he does make feel more egregious than they would otherwise be, and some of his choices, particularly in regard to female sexuality, feel very tone-deaf.
This account is heavily fictionalised, changing various aspects of Lili's life, including her wife, Greta's, lesbianism, and aspects of her relationships with other people. There are many places where I thought the novel worked, though, particularly in the first two thirds: Ebershoff writes beautifully about places and landscape, and evokes the complicated ways in which we relate to other people. He gives a lot of space to Greta's character development, and her relationship to Lili, and to Lili's male identity, Einar. His prose feels laboured at times, which I think is down to this being a first novel, but in many aspects it succeeds, particularly in the way Ebershoff captures interpersonal tension, affection, and internal conflict. Ebershoff depicts Lili as feeling like she is two different people: that Einar is one aspect of her personality which disappears when she becomes Lili. This isn't an experience I've heard trans people describe, but given that Lili is living at a time when she believes no one else is like her, and has no words to describe how she feels, I can imagine her coming up with this particular way to explain her experience to herself.
Historically, Lili is probably the second person to receive gender affirmation surgery. Ebershoff describes her surgeries as gruelling, which I'm sure they were, but I felt the way he wrote about Lili's physical pain could be gratuitous and at times strongly othering. The sections following Lili through her surgeries were the clumsiest parts of the book.