The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood ; Youth ; Dependency

December 1, 2020
The three memoirs by Danish poet Ditlevsen, originally published between 1967 and 1971, are here gathered into a single volume, and cover in merciless detail her life from childhood in the 1920s in a working class neighborhood of Copenhagen on through the early years of her fourth marriage. Obsessed with writing poetry and fiction from her earliest years, and continually torn between living a "normal" life as a wife and mother and being a working writer, she married a magazine publisher 35 years her senior when she was 18, and went on to marry and divorce three more times. With a determined refusal of sentimentality, she describes a horrifying backstreet abortion and the even more dreadful period of years when she became addicted to Demerol and other drugs, enabled by her sleazy third husband. By the time the third memoir ends, this addiction persists, and in fact contributed to her death by suicide in 1976. Readers will find her ruthless self-scrutiny both admirable and shocking.Women in Focus: The 19th in 2020

COPYRIGHT(2020) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

January 15, 2021
The noted Danish novelist and poet delivers a rueful, self-excoriating account of a life of self-doubt, misery, and addiction. "I do whatever I can to please him, because I'm so thankful he married me. Although I know something still isn't quite right, I carefully avoid thinking about that." So writes Ditlevsen in the third part of this autobiographical trilogy, written between 1969 and 1971. It's not so much that she was dependent on the men in her life, none of them quite right for her, but instead on the drugs and alcohol that overtook her. One partner who injected her muttered that her veins were clogging up, adding, "Maybe we can find one in your foot." Ditlevsen traces an unhappy present--much of the later narrative is set at the time of the German defeat in World War II, the streets of Denmark's capital full of child soldiers in Wehrmacht uniforms--to a childhood of discouragement (her father insisted that "a girl can't be a poet") and a youth in which she was convinced that she was "condemned to loneliness and anonymity." For all the self-doubt and later chemical abuse, however, she did rise as a poet even if getting published was full of the usual roadblocks--and more, as when she writes that an editor who accepted her work "pats me on the behind, absent-mindedly and mechanically." A rare humorous moment comes when, after drunkenly choking down a fistful of methadone pills, she asks the visiting English writer Evelyn Waugh what brought him to Denmark: "He answered that he always took trips around the world when his children were home on vacation from boarding school, because he couldn't stand them." Given the mostly grim revelations in her book, it's small wonder that Ditlevsen came to an unhappy end, though not before publishing some of the most memorable works in modern Danish literature. Memoir as confession--a powerful, psychologically astute work of self-examination and remembrance.

COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.