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“Their faces were about to fall right off, and their frightened hands fumbled over them so that the unknown that was beneath the skin wouldn’t reveal itself to be a secret illness hiding behind what was visible to everyone.”
More than disembodied faces & voices haunt Lise, a famous writer, during a psychotic episode. Very much inspired by Ditlevsen’s life – the childhood poverty, writing fame, struggle with addiction – she took her real suffering & created a brief, disturbing account of a woman tormented by her own mind. Childhood loneliness tends to stay with people & Tove was a lonely, lonely child.
Having just read The Copenhagen Trilogy I spotted many details taken straight from those memoirs, down to a picture on the wall of Tove’s childhood living room, now hanging in Lise’s house. Her impoverished childhood created certain fears, but fame brings a new set of anxieties which can compound over time & the observant emotional detachment which has always been her shield against the world disintegrates, along with her mind. Truthful in the portrayal of someone who will always struggle with reality in some way.
Brutally concise (concisely brutal?). There are some amusing lines (“...her eyebrows grew together like a couple of girlfriends who can’t tear themselves away from each other.”), but it's mostly fast-paced madness. Trove’s prose is captivating, really beautiful. There are many extraordinary sentences here. This writing is nightmare & poetry woven together.
“But what was real in this world, and what was not real? Wasn’t it a kind of sickness that people could walk around holding onto their own ego? – that whole chaos of voices, faces, and memories that they only dared to let slip from themselves drop by drop, and never could be certain of retrieving again.”