The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood; Youth; Dependency [Paperback]

Called a masterpiece byThe New York Times, the acclaimed trilogy from Tove Ditlevsen, a pioneer in the field of genre-bending confessional writing.

Tove Ditlevsen is today celebrated as one of the most important and unique voices in twentieth-century Danish literature, andThe Copenhagen Trilogy(196971) is her acknowledged masterpiece.Childhoodtells the story of a misfit childs single-minded determination to become a poet;Youthdescribes her early experiences of sex, work, and independence.Dependencypicks 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 todays discussions around feminism. Ditlevsens trilogy is remarkable for its intensity and its immersive depiction of a world of complex female friendships, family, and growing upin this sense, its Copenhagens answer to Elena Ferrantes 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. Having been dismissed by the critical establishment in her lifetime as a working-class female writer, she is now being rediscovered and championed as one of Denmarks most important modern authors, with Tove fever gripping readers.