Tove Ditlevsen

Growing up in a working-class neighbourhood in Copenhagen, Tove feels that her childhood is made for a completely different girl. As 'long, mysterious words begin to crawl across my soul', she comes to understand that she has a vocation that will define her life. Her path seems assured, but she has no idea of the struggles ahead - love affairs, wanted and unwanted pregnancies, artistic failure and destructive addiction. As the years go by, the central tension of Tove's life comes into painful focus- the terrible lure of dependency, in all its forms, and the possibility of living freely and fearlessly - as an artist on her own terms.

The Copenhagen Trilogy

Childhood, Youth, Dependency

ame 

You can't talk to anyone about these kinds of things, and I always dream about meeting some mysterious person who will listen to me and understand me. I know from books that such people exist, but you can't find any of them on my childhood street.

Childhood is long and narrow like a coffin, and you can't get out of it on your own. […] You can’t get out of childhood. and it clings to you like a bad smell. You notice it in other children - each childhood had its own smell. You don’t recognize your own and sometimes you’re afraid that it’s worse than others’. 

for the strength Tove must’ve summoned to write this trilogy with such vulnerability, i could not admire her more. 

a girl whose love for poetry couldn’t quite match her love for anyone, she accepted anyone who loved her. a fascinating and simultaneously ordinary life, conveyed through tender and captivating writing. 

it was a very hard read by the end. it’s tragic to know that, despite its somewhat happy ending, her story sadly continued down a darker path. 

i don’t have the right words to do this book justice, but i know Tove will stay with me for a long time. 

marta

“In the morning there was hope.”

for the strength Tove must’ve summoned to write this trilogy with such vulnerability, i could not admire her more. 

a girl whose love for poetry couldn’t quite match her love for anyone, she accepted anyone who loved her. a fascinating and simultaneously ordinary life, conveyed through tender and captivating writing. 

it was a very hard read by the end. it’s tragic to know that, despite its somewhat happy ending, her story sadly continued down a darker path. 

i don’t have the right words to do this book justice, but i know Tove will stay with me for a long time. 

I went in knowing nothing about this trilogy but the fact that Tove Ditlevsen died of suicide some 5 years after publishing the final book. An autofiction/memoir, this would be perhaps the third book I’ve read in this vein, after 

 by Osamu Dazai. It is always difficult to read and review these books, knowing that any sort of joy experienced and described in an author’s childhood, and perhaps the artistic experience of releasing their life to the world, will almost certainly be eclipsed by the reader’s knowledge of what eventually happens to them. This dynamic creates a kind of perverse invasion in which one desperately tries to search for the signs—perhaps from childhood—to figure out ‘what went wrong’, to find the clues in memoirs, and to see how an author could have been saved. But writing isn’t reality—our lives do not follow the conventions of a novel, and depression, pain, trauma, and addiction are seared so deeply in a person that it resists transcription into language. What we can do is read—with understanding and empathy—in a way that honours the life of someone who so sadly slipped from every person’s grasp in the end.

The Copenhagen Trilogy is the name for three books written by Danish author and poet Tove Ditlevsen, published in the years 1968 to 1972. These books are translated as 

in English, ‘Dependency’ being, in a translator’s flourish, the best attempt to capture the double-meaning of the vague Danish 

, which means both ‘poison’ and ‘married.’ Each book focusses on a specific part of Ditlevsen’s life. 

is aptly her life as a young girl growing in poverty: her domestic life with her distant yet girlish mother and her loving but pragmatic and utilitarian socialist father, both concerned for their daughter in as much as she is able to grow pretty and conform to what a girl should be. From her earliest age she is therefore outcasted, concerned less about marriage and more about her dreams of being a poet, something seen as unrealistic by her parents, especially for women in that era. 

follows her teenage and adolescent years, exposing the harsh capitalist reality of child labour and the entailing poor working conditions, alongside Tove’s initial ambitions and attempts to be published and her early romantic relationships with distant and developmentally stilted men. Throughout all of this she navigates the cage of early 20th century sexism, poverty, death, and ostracisation. 

The main highlight of the novel for me is the final book, 

, which was a terrifying look at Tove’s adult life, navigating abusive and controlling marriages, the birth of her children, and, in the most harrowing scenes, her desperate search to acquire an abortion in Nazi-occupied Denmark and subsequent horrifying opioid addiction. The depiction of addiction in this novel was especially heartbreaking, watching Tove betray everyone in her life due to the sheer chemical dependency she's introduced to solely due to the love she feels she has lacked her whole life makes you want to cry, because following the first two books it feels like love was never on the cards with her upbringing and circumstances. Addiction is a horrible, shameful thing, and Ditlevsen does not conceal the amount of suffering inflicted both upon her and by her, which only makes it more heartbreaking. And the sheer fear of her enabling and abusive husbands is deeply unsettling.

In terms of style, Ditlevsen writes in a way more attuned to autofiction than memoir, and for the first two books I was very impressed with how well she captured the mind and thoughts of a child in a way that wasn’t too plain. All of the books are divided into short chapters around 6 pages long, and these are usually line-break-less montages filled with these curt, incisive, realist but sometimes poetical descriptions. The style is exploited to produce disconcerting effects, for example when traumatic life events are given the same treatment in prose as, say, going to the store and buying bread. It reinforces the idea that trauma isn’t something experienced but something reflected upon and recurring—an off-the-cuff remark of ‘people just use one another’ resurfaces throughout Tove’s childhood and defines her relationships with everyone in her life. A very serious incident of self-harm in 

is given less than a paragraph. The pace can be dizzying—one used to the meticulousness of autofiction by Knausgaard, for example, would be blown away at how Tove’s entire life is more or less described in full in under 400 pages.

This speed comes from not saying certain things, and even in that I think Ditlevsen’s silence on certain topics enhances the solipsistic nature of the trilogy and furthers its intended effect. For example, it is set during the 1930s-1950s, in which time Hitler rises to power, invades Europe, and the Nazis occupy Denmark. These major world events do not affect Tove in the slightest, or, if they do, it’s through the ‘side characters’ in her life—landladies who become Nazi-obsessed, rations and curfews imposed, or husbands who decide to fight for the Danish Resistance. World War 2 is an aside for Tove, who remains focussed on herself and her literature and relationships. It’s a very interesting choice—in the end, she’s not writing historical fiction, and her only obligation is to herself in writing these novels.

There is no happy ending to this trilogy, and everyone who reads this knows this already. In between her retelling of her life, she sprinkles in the poems and works she had created during her career—the actual contents of which are sometimes left undisclosed. It would be amazing to read more of her fiction to the extent it is translated to English, given the horrible circumstances and beautiful, brief, traumatic life she lived. 

shain

I went in knowing nothing about this trilogy but the fact that Tove Ditlevsen died of suicide some 5 years after publishing the final book. An autofiction/memoir, this would be perhaps the third book I’ve read in this vein, after The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath and No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai. It is always difficult to read and review these books, knowing that any sort of joy experienced and described in an author’s childhood, and perhaps the artistic experience of releasing their life to the world, will almost certainly be eclipsed by the reader’s knowledge of what eventually happens to them. This dynamic creates a kind of perverse invasion in which one desperately tries to search for the signs—perhaps from childhood—to figure out ‘what went wrong’, to find the clues in memoirs, and to see how an author could have been saved. But writing isn’t reality—our lives do not follow the conventions of a novel, and depression, pain, trauma, and addiction are seared so deeply in a person that it resists transcription into language. What we can do is read—with understanding and empathy—in a way that honours the life of someone who so sadly slipped from every person’s grasp in the end.

The Copenhagen Trilogy is the name for three books written by Danish author and poet Tove Ditlevsen, published in the years 1968 to 1972. These books are translated as Childhood, Youth, and Dependency in English, ‘Dependency’ being, in a translator’s flourish, the best attempt to capture the double-meaning of the vague Danish gift, which means both ‘poison’ and ‘married.’ Each book focusses on a specific part of Ditlevsen’s life. Childhood is aptly her life as a young girl growing in poverty: her domestic life with her distant yet girlish mother and her loving but pragmatic and utilitarian socialist father, both concerned for their daughter in as much as she is able to grow pretty and conform to what a girl should be. From her earliest age she is therefore outcasted, concerned less about marriage and more about her dreams of being a poet, something seen as unrealistic by her parents, especially for women in that era. Youth follows her teenage and adolescent years, exposing the harsh capitalist reality of child labour and the entailing poor working conditions, alongside Tove’s initial ambitions and attempts to be published and her early romantic relationships with distant and developmentally stilted men. Throughout all of this she navigates the cage of early 20th century sexism, poverty, death, and ostracisation. 

The main highlight of the novel for me is the final book, Dependency, which was a terrifying look at Tove’s adult life, navigating abusive and controlling marriages, the birth of her children, and, in the most harrowing scenes, her desperate search to acquire an abortion in Nazi-occupied Denmark and subsequent horrifying opioid addiction. The depiction of addiction in this novel was especially heartbreaking, watching Tove betray everyone in her life due to the sheer chemical dependency she's introduced to solely due to the love she feels she has lacked her whole life makes you want to cry, because following the first two books it feels like love was never on the cards with her upbringing and circumstances. Addiction is a horrible, shameful thing, and Ditlevsen does not conceal the amount of suffering inflicted both upon her and by her, which only makes it more heartbreaking. And the sheer fear of her enabling and abusive husbands is deeply unsettling.

In terms of style, Ditlevsen writes in a way more attuned to autofiction than memoir, and for the first two books I was very impressed with how well she captured the mind and thoughts of a child in a way that wasn’t too plain. All of the books are divided into short chapters around 6 pages long, and these are usually line-break-less montages filled with these curt, incisive, realist but sometimes poetical descriptions. The style is exploited to produce disconcerting effects, for example when traumatic life events are given the same treatment in prose as, say, going to the store and buying bread. It reinforces the idea that trauma isn’t something experienced but something reflected upon and recurring—an off-the-cuff remark of ‘people just use one another’ resurfaces throughout Tove’s childhood and defines her relationships with everyone in her life. A very serious incident of self-harm in Childhood is given less than a paragraph. The pace can be dizzying—one used to the meticulousness of autofiction by Knausgaard, for example, would be blown away at how Tove’s entire life is more or less described in full in under 400 pages.

This speed comes from not saying certain things, and even in that I think Ditlevsen’s silence on certain topics enhances the solipsistic nature of the trilogy and furthers its intended effect. For example, it is set during the 1930s-1950s, in which time Hitler rises to power, invades Europe, and the Nazis occupy Denmark. These major world events do not affect Tove in the slightest, or, if they do, it’s through the ‘side characters’ in her life—landladies who become Nazi-obsessed, rations and curfews imposed, or husbands who decide to fight for the Danish Resistance. World War 2 is an aside for Tove, who remains focussed on herself and her literature and relationships. It’s a very interesting choice—in the end, she’s not writing historical fiction, and her only obligation is to herself in writing these novels.

There is no happy ending to this trilogy, and everyone who reads this knows this already. In between her retelling of her life, she sprinkles in the poems and works she had created during her career—the actual contents of which are sometimes left undisclosed. It would be amazing to read more of her fiction to the extent it is translated to English, given the horrible circumstances and beautiful, brief, traumatic life she lived. 

Gelaine Trinidad

Simona Paunova

“Dependency” was heavy to digest as I felt physical pain while reading. A strong wave of emotions overwhelmed me and I had to take breaks between paragraphs. Tove is writing about her life and drug addiction, so it’s not a book for everyone to read. Still it amazes me how she managed to produce such strong writing while battling pain, fear and reality, it’s beyond words.

Camila

** spoiler alert **
           Childhood: 5⭐️
"... inside of me long, mysterious words began to crawl across my soul like a membrane. "
"Childhood is long and narrow like a coffin, and you can't get out of it on your own [...] You can't get out of childhood and it clings to you like a bad smell. You notice it in other children — each childhood has its own smell. You don't recognise your own and sometimes you're afraid it's worse than others'."

Youth: 3.5⭐️
"... i can't find any new wedge into the world that is moved by poems and, I hope, by people who write them."
"My book! I take it in my hands and feel a solemn happiness, that isn't like anything I've ever felt before. Tove Ditlevsen. Pigesind. It can't be taken back anymore. It is irretrievable. The book will always exist, regardless of how my fate takes shape."

Dependency: 4.5⭐️
"I lay there fantasising about a novel I was going to write. [...] I was writing it with my mind. Long, beautiful sentences flowed through my thoughts as I lay in the divan, looking at my typewriter powerless to make one single movement towards it."
"Horrified, I realized while I stood there that the longing was inside me like rot in a tree, or like an embryo growing all on its own, even though you want nothing to do with it."

Childhood, Youth, Dependency The Copenhagen Trilogy

Reviews

Highlights