The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen
Review of The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen
The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen (2021). Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
This is a book I have been wanting to read for awhile, ever since I saw that The New York Times was touting about how this collection of Ditlevsen’s three books combined was something that someone must read in 2021.
The original three books were published back when she was alive, in the late 1960s, before she tragically killed herself due to her depression. And, reading what she went through during this book, I’m not surprised that this was the sad outcome to her life.
I ended up procrastinating on reading this book for the longest time. My library didn’t order a copy until after the day I ended up buying my own paperback. After watching a movie at my local AMC, I ended up wandering into the Barnes & Nobles next door to burn some time before my mother picked me up.
I left the Barnes & Nobles that day with a copy of The Copenhagen Trilogy and the Sylvia Plath biography. You can find my review of the Plath biography here. I brought my copy of Copenhagen to Hawaii with me, where I devoured it on a nice beach. Here’s my review!
The life of Tove Ditlevsen, told in three different eras of her life.
As mentioned above, The Copenhagen Trilogy is split into three different parts. The first section is when she is a child going through the motions of life and watching the adults around her interact, the second part is when she graduates from school and starts meeting up with boys romantically for the first time, and then the final part is Tove’s life as an adult, when she has a lot more romantic issues and the underlying threat of mental health.
A thing to note about Tove that one may not know going into this book: she was a Danish poet, and she unfortunately cut her life short by killing herself when she was only fifty-eight. She published twenty-nine books during her lifetime despite her time be tragically shorter than it should have been.
At the very beginning, in the “Youth” section, it’s established that Tove’s family does not have much in life. Her family is poor, her grandmother lost all of her savings when her local bank went under, and the expectation at the time was that when you graduated at sixteen, you were to go off and join the workforce in an attempt to bring some money home. Tove is not at that age yet in the memoirs.
These really were not the happy times of Tove’s life, as her mother and father seemed to not only hit her, but they also struggled in life as well. It is in this section her uncle, aunt, and grandmother all die, marking her life even more in tragedy.
We begin to see the tendencies in Tove’s life to lean towards writing as a form of self-expression, although she is discouraged away from it because of the way that it does not earn money.
We see in some sections the relationship her dad and she have with each other through literary arts; her father likes to read and discuss, say, philosophy, while her mother thinks all of those things are quite useless.
Tove, however, by the second section of the book manages to publish her first collection before she is even twenty-one years old, This promise was first seen in the childhood section, as editors showed interest in her work even before this time.
The end of the young adult section, though, is when we start to get deeper into the complex world of Tove, the one that’s plagued with drug addiction, mental health issues, and dealing with the expectations of her as a wife and a woman.
The last section of the memoirs is honestly pretty difficult to get through because of how in-depth she goes about her struggles, but there are many moments where you find this struggling young woman is finding solace through literature and the arts.
It’s an authentic memoir, as she does not try to hide anything from her readers. This is Tove Ditlevsen laid bare on the page, and I’m sure writing and publishing for this must have been briefly relieving for the writer.
She was able to be heard in a way that she could never be so open before: through the memoir. Her descriptions might be harrowing about what she faced in life, whether it is poverty or abuse, but they are straightforward. Especially considering this was written in the late sixties, I commend her bravery.
Overall Thoughts
All in all, I think this is a must-read book even if you didn’t know who Tove was beforehand. I did not know who she was until I saw the NYT review of this book, and I still think that this was an incredible read. The 1960s were a fascinating time in women’s literature because even in the United States, poets like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton were emerging as major figures.
They, too, unfortunately fell to the same fate as Tove, but the fact that women were able to be so raw and honest about their struggles is truly revolutionary in mainstream literature.
Now, these women, especially Plath, have been mocked because they were so open—even today, there are many Sylvia Plath jokes, and the fact that she is often known for her suicide is sexist. Tove’s story is not only well-written in this book, but it connects to broader societal issues.
