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| Two Women on a Wharf, 1949 by Willem de Kooning |
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| Tove Ditlevsen |
The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen, translated by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 384 pages.
Bailey Trela
January 25, 2021
IN AN ESSAY IN The New York Review of Books, Elizabeth Hardwick described Joan Didion as “a martyr of facticity,” characterizing her novels as elliptical, quick, and apt to self-crucify on acerbic details. This might just as well be applied to the works of the Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen, whose late-career autobiographical triptych, The Copenhagen Trilogy, was recently released by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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| Tove Ditlevsen |
Artistic individualism versus prescriptive social modernism
Photo: Nordfoto / NTB
A portrait of Danish author Tove Ditlevsen from 1975.
Mogens “Mo” Pedersen
Assens, Denmark
In her time, she was loved in her own country of Denmark. Today, almost half a century after her death in 1976, her work has seen an upsurge of interest, at home and abroad. Internationally her Copenhagen Trilogy (her memoirs) emerged last year in a new edition and crisp translation by two preeminent translators, Tiina Nunnally (Childhood and Youth) and Michael Favala Goldman (Dependency). The New York Times praised it for its “stunning clarity, humor, and candidness.” Ditlevsen herself pointed to her memoirs as her best work. They have now been translated into 30 different languages. This is true for a few other works of hers. Her poetry, however, so beloved in Denmark, has not yet achieved the same attention as her prose, but that may come in time.
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| Tove Ditlevsen, the Danish poet and author who died in 1976. Photograph: Jarner Palle |
Here is a book whose time has come, first, because it fits the openness of conversations about mental health today, but also because there’s an appetite for more work by Tove Ditlevsen, following the publication of her exceptional trilogy of memoirs in 2019. The Faces, which was published in Danish in 1968 and now has its first UK publication, translated by Tiina Nunnally, was written in the same period as Ditlevsen’s trilogy and is inspired by her life, but transforms the material alchemically into art.
The central character, Lise Mundus, is a writer of children’s books, struggling with arbitrary success; she has won an award for a book she “considered no better or worse than her other books” and is phoned up by newspapers seeking the views of “prominent women” on trivial issues (“are miniskirts destroying marriage?”). Fame has “brutally ripped away the veil that always separated her from reality” and now she “clings to that fragile sense of security which was nothing more than the absence of change”.
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| Illustratio by Jonathan Wolstenhome |
Following her 2016 debut, “Behold the Dreamers,” Mbue’s sweeping and quietly devastating second novel begins in 1980 in the fictional African village of Kosawa, where representatives from an American oil company have come to meet with the locals, whose children are dying because of the environmental havoc (fallow fields, poisoned water) wreaked by its drilling and pipelines. This decades-spanning fable of power and corruption turns out to be something much less clear-cut than the familiar David-and-Goliath tale of a sociopathic corporation and the lives it steamrolls. Through the eyes of Kosawa’s citizens young and old, Mbue constructs a nuanced exploration of self-interest, of what it means to want in the age of capitalism and colonialism — these machines of malicious, insatiable wanting.
Random House. $28.
In Kitamura’s fourth novel, an unnamed court translator in The Hague is tasked with intimately vanishing into the voices and stories of war criminals whom she alone can communicate with; falling meanwhile into a tumultuous entanglement with a man whose marriage may or may not be over for good. Kitamura’s sleek and spare prose elegantly breaks grammatical convention, mirroring the book’s concern with the bleeding lines between intimacies — especially between the sincere and the coercive. Like her previous novel, “A Separation,” “Intimacies” scrutinizes the knowability of those around us, not as an end in itself but as a lens on grand social issues from gentrification to colonialism to feminism. The path a life cuts through the world, this book seems to say, has its greatest significance in the effect it has on others.
Riverhead Books. $26.
“The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois,” the first novel by Jeffers, a celebrated poet, is many things at once: a moving coming-of-age saga, an examination of race and an excavation of American history. It cuts back and forth between the tale of Ailey Pearl Garfield, a Black girl growing up at the end of the 20th century, and the “songs” of her ancestors, Native Americans and enslaved African Americans who lived through the formation of the United States. As their stories converge, “Love Songs” creates an unforgettable portrait of Black life that reveals how the past still reverberates today.
Harper/HarperCollins. $28.99.
Lockwood first found acclaim as a poet on the internet, with gloriously inventive and ribald verse — sexts elevated to virtuosity. In “Priestdaddy,” her indelible 2017 memoir about growing up in rectories across the Midwest presided over by her gun-loving, guitar-playing father, a Catholic priest, she called tweeting “an art form, like sculpture, or honking the national anthem under your armpit.” Here, in her first novel, she distills the pleasures and deprivations of life split between online and flesh-and-blood interactions, transfiguring the dissonance into art. The result is a book that reads like a prose poem, at once sublime, profane, intimate, philosophical, hilarious and, eventually, deeply moving.
Riverhead Books. $25.
Labatut expertly stitches together the stories of the 20th century’s greatest thinkers to explore both the ecstasy and agony of scientific breakthroughs: their immense gains for society as well as their steep human costs. His journey to the outermost edges of knowledge — guided by the mathematician Alexander Grothendieck, the physicist Werner Heisenberg and the chemist Fritz Haber, among others — offers glimpses of a universe with limitless potential underlying the observable world, a “dark nucleus at the heart of things” that some of its witnesses decide is better left alone. This extraordinary hybrid of fiction and nonfiction also provokes the frisson of an extended true-or-false test: The further we read, the blurrier the line gets between fact and fabulism.
New York Review Books. Paper, $17.95.
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.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $30.
