Recent Reading: The Copenhagen Trilogy

Today I finished Tove Ditlevsen's The Copenhagen Trilogy. The Times called it one of the ten best books of 2021, and I certainly think it is worth reading. Here is what they said about it:

Ditlevsen’s gorgeous memoirs, first published in Denmark in the 1960s and ’70s and collected here in a single volume, detail her hardscrabble upbringing, career path and merciless addictions: a powerful account of the struggle to reconcile art and life. She joined the working ranks at 14, became a renowned poet by her early 20s, and found herself, after two failed marriages, wedded to a psychopathic doctor and hopelessly dependent on opioids by her 30s. Yet for all the dramatic twists of her life, these books together project a stunning clarity, humor and candidness, casting light not just on the world’s harsh realities but on the inexplicable impulses of our secret selves.

In an essay about the book in the Times, Parul Sehgal had this to say about the trilogy:

They exert a particular fascination, these books. It’s like watching something burn. The language is plain, unadorned, almost masklike — a provocative composure that settles even more tightly over the narration as we enter “Dependency,” in which Ditlevsen describes her years of addiction.

It’s this composure that gives the trilogy its suspense — and it’s a kind of composure that is much misunderstood. For all the expected reasons, no quality is praised more strenuously in women’s writing than “control.” See also “restraint” and “lack of sentimentality.” But control is just one effect, and in some ways the canniest — nothing else so efficiently earns the reader’s trust and can lull her into sleepy credulity. “Clarity” is no different; is there better camouflage than absolute candor? Ditlevsen confesses and confesses, but it is what she does not say, what she shows us and does not acknowledge — the murk in the book — that gives the memoirs that rippling quality of something alive, something still unfurling.

I do recommend The Copenhagen Trilogy.