The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen

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The dark hallway smelled of fear, so I was afraid that Mrs Olfertsen would notice it, as if I'd brought the smell with me. My body and my movements became stiff and awkward as I stood listening to her fluttering voice explaining many things and, in between the explanations, running on like an empty spool that babbled about nothing in an uninterrupted stream – about the weather, about the boy, about how tall I was for my age. She asked whether I had an apron with me, and I took my mother's out of the emptied school bag. There was a hole near the seam because there was something or other wrong with everything that my mother was responsible for, and I was touched by the sight of it. My mother was far away and I wouldn't see her for eight hours. I was among strangers – I was someone whose physical strength they'd bought for a certain number of hours each day for a certain payment. They didn't care about the rest of me. When we went out to the kitchen, Toni, the little boy, came running up in his pajamas. 'Good morning, Mummy,' he said sweetly, leaning against his mother's legs and giving me a hostile look. The woman gently pulled herself free from him and said, 'This is Tove, say hello to the nice lady.' Reluctantly he put out his hand and when I took it, he said threateningly, 'You have to do everything I say or else I'll shoot you.' His mother laughed loudly and showed me a tray with cups and a teapot, and asked me to fix the tea and come into the living room with it.
—From Youth, chapter 1, by Tove Ditlevsen, translated from the Danish by Tiina Nunnally. This segment is on pages 103-104 of the American hardcover version of The Copenhagen Trilogy.  

The Copenhagen Trilogy is a compilation of three shorter books by Tove Ditlevsen, translated from the Danish by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman (Penguin Random House in Great Britain, 2020, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the United States, 2021). Childhood and Youth were first published in Copenhagen, Denmark, as Barndom and Ungdom (Gyldendal, 1967). Dependency was first published in Copenhagen as Gift (Gyldendal, 1971).

The New York Times included The Copenhagen Trilogy on its list of the ten best books of 2021, writing that "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." A full review of the book, by Megan O'Grady, appeared in the New York Times on January 26, 2021.

"Before Rehab," an astonishing excerpt from Dependency, written by Tove Ditlevsen and translated from the Danish by Michael Favala Goldman (credited as Michael Goldman), appeared in the Fall 2018 issue of the Apple Valley Review. This excerpt, Chapter 5 of Dependency, is on pages 341-348 of the hardcover edition of The Copenhagen Trilogy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021).

In an essay in The New Yorker, Hilton Als wrote that "Dependency strikes me as an inspired title for this volume, which is called Gift in Danish—a word that can mean 'marriage' or 'poison.' Ditlevsen has a dependency not only on Demerol but on the question of what it means to be a wife while also a lovesick daughter and an artist." The essay, "Tove Ditlevsen's Art of Estrangement," appeared in the Books section of The New Yorker in the issue for February 15 & 22, 2021.

Als also said, "Don’t think yourself odd if, after reading the Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen's romantic, spiritually macabre, and ultimately devastating collection of memoirs . . . you spend hours, if not days, in a reverie of alienation." No comment about that. 

In my opinion, The Copenhagen Trilogy is even more phenomenal when paired with the unabridged audiobook from Macmillan Audio. I recently read the book again, in addition to listening to the audiobook, and the narration by Stine Wintlev brings the book to life in a new way. The audiobook is available directly from Macmillan Audio as well as from OverDrive, Audible, Spotify, SoundCloud, and elsewhere.

THE COPENHAGEN TRILOGY

Childhood, Youth, Dependency

By Tove Ditlevsen

Translated by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Available online from Macmillan in hardcover, trade paperback, e-book, and digital audio