The Copenhagen Trilogy

Resumen del libro

Tove Ditlevsen is today celebrated as one of the most important and unique voices in twentieth-century Danish literature, and The Copenhagen Trilogy (196971) is her acknowledged masterpiece. Childhood tells the story of a misfit child's single-minded determination to become a poet; Youth describes her early experiences of sex, work, and independence. Dependency picks up the story as the narrator embarks on the first of her four marriages and goes on to describe her horrible descent into drug addiction, enabled by her sinister, gaslighting doctor-husband.

Throughout, the narrator grapples with the tension between her vocation as a writer and her competing roles as daughter, wife, mother, and drug addict, and she writes about female experience and identity in a way that feels very fresh and pertinent to today's discussions around feminism.

Ditlevsen's trilogy is remarkable for its intensity and its immersive depiction of a world of complex female friendships, family, and growing up in this sense, it's Copenhagen's answer to Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels. She can also be seen as a spiritual forerunner of confessional writers like Karl Ove Knausgaard, Annie Ernaux, Rachel Cusk, and Deborah Levy. Her trilogy is drawn from her own experiences, but reads like the most compelling kind of fiction.

Born in a working-class neighborhood in Copenhagen in 1917, Ditlevsen became famous for her poetry while still a teenager, and went on to write novels, stories, and memoirs before committing suicide in 1976.

Biografía del autor

Tove Irma Margit Ditlevsen (1917 - 1976) es considerada una de las voces fundamentales y más originales de la literatura danesa. Nació en Copenhague y creció en Vesterbro, un barrio de clase obrera. Las experiencias de su niñez fueron los puntos focales de su trabajo, así como la tensión entre su vocación de ser escritora y el rol que se esperaba de ella por ser mujer. Ditlevsen se casó y se divorció cuatro veces y publicó más de una veintena de libros, entre cuentos, novelas, poesía y memorias. Ha sido galardonada con los premios más importantes de las letras danesas, como el Tagea Brandt Rejselegat en 1953 y el De Gyldne Laurb r en 1956. Se suicidó en 1976.