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the complete review - memoirs

Childhood
The Copenhagen Trilogy - I

by
Tove Ditlevsen

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

A- : neatly crafted, nicely done

See our review for fuller assessment.

  Review Consensus:

  Very impressed.

  From the Reviews:

• "Though written years after the events they describe, the pages -- fluidly translated by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman -- have the immediacy of diary entries so fresh that the ink has barely dried." - Liz Jensen, The Guardian
  
  
• "Soon, her aversion to being a child transforms into dread of what faces her as an adult. She leaves school at fourteen, to the understanding regret of her teachers, in order to work." - Lauren Oyler, Harper's
  
  
• "To get it out of the way: they are the best books I have read this year. These very slim volumes slip in like a stiletto and do their work once inside. (...) Childhood has the simple declarative sentences of Natalia Ginzburg and the pervasive horror of a good fairy story." - John Self, New Statesman
  
  
• "The spell is so intense, the hand so light, that you hardly know how you came to find yourself enclosed in this snow globe with a terrifyingly volatile mother; a possibly self-deluding father; an economic and historical setting; a tiny, incipient author who can already conceal and fortify herself within a protective bower of words; and raging storms of love, fear, resentment, isolation, desire, shame, delight, grief, and pity." - Deborah Eisenberg, The New York Review of Books
  
  
• "Few writers have written so rapturously of the joy, the necessity, of writing. It became a compulsion for Ditlevsen. Language dulled her pain and papered over the past." - Parul Sehgal, The New York Times
  
  
• "Read together, they form a particular kind of masterpiece, one that helps fill a particular kind of void. The trilogy arrives like something found deep in an ancestor's bureau drawer, a secret stashed away amid the socks and sachets and photos of dead lovers. The surprise isn't just its ink-damp immediacy and vitality" - Megan O'Grady, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "One's heart sinks at the close of Childhood, which sets the tone for what's to come." - Hilton Als, The New Yorker
  
  
• "One of the many semi-miraculous elements of Ditlevsen's prose, which appears at first glance breezily artless, is the way she'll settle on an object and rub her characters up against it, grounding them in the physicality of her world." - Alex Preston, The Observer
  
  
• "The force of her writing is not to be found in her superior endurance skills or moral strength, but in the precision with which she uses words and unexpected images." - Lucasta Miller, Times Literary Supplement

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Tove Ditlevsen was born in 1917, the second of two children in a working class Danish family. Her The Copenhagen Trilogy chronicles three stages of her life: childhood, in this volume, covering the time until her confirmation, when she is fourteen and can leave school and get a job; youth, covering the years of first independence -- jobs; moving out of the family apartment; and then, in Dependency, early adulthood. Fundamental to all three stages -- to her entire life -- is her compulsion to write (especially poetry): from early on she is passionate about language and expression, driven by a clear ambition: "Someday I'll write down all of the words that flow through me". (Her ambition is also one of affirmation and recognition: it is not just about the writing, but also about being seen as a writer: "Someday other people will read them in a book and marvel that a girl could be a poet, after all".)
       Ditlevsen lies about the year of her birth -- "I was born on December 14, 1918", she claims in Childhood --, casting, early on, a shadow of doubt about how reliable a narrator she might be (though of course it's not clear how clear it would have been to her original readers that this is, in fact, a lie). (Amusingly enough, she later points out that her mother consistently lied about her own age, too -- "even to us, who know very well how old she is".) But overall the impressionistic account of childhood certainly convinces, vividly capturing growing up in a Denmark with limited opportunities and yet a certain sense of security.
       The young Ditlevsen is fairly self-confident in many ways, but also knows she stands apart -- that she's: "odd because I read books, like my father, and because I don't understand how to play". She goes along, with a great deal, seemingly trying to fit in, but she never really can. By the time she's fourteen, it still frustrates her, but she recognizes it clearly:

It bothers me a lot that I don't seem to own any real feelings anymore, but always have to pretend that I do by copying other people's reactions.

I'm moved by poetry and lyrical prose, now as always -- but the things that are described leave me completely cold. I don't think very much of reality.

Page after page. I don't have it in me to read it. It fills me with sadness and unbearable boredom. I can't understand how language -- that delicate and sensitive instrument -- can be so terribly mistreated, or how such monstrous sentences can find their way into a book that gets into the library where a clever and attractive woman like Miss Mollerup actually recommends it to defenseless children to read. For now, however, I can't express these thoughts, so I have to be content with saying that the books are boring

You can't get out of childhood, and it clings to you like a bad smell. You notice it in other children -- each childhood has its own smell. You don't recognize your own and sometimes you're afraid that it's worse than others'.

Even though no one else cares for my poems, I have to write them because it dulls the sorrow and longing in my heart.

All that happened was that I got some cuts; I still have faint marks from them. My only consolation in this uncertain, trembling world was writing poetry like this:

Once I was young and all aglow,
full of laughter and fun.
I was like a blushing rose.
Now I am old and forgotten

     I was twelve years old then.

     Time passed and my childhood grew thin and flat, paperlike. It was tired and threadbare, and in low moments it didn't look like it would last until I was grown up. [...] My childhood was supposed to last until I as fourteen, but what was I going to do if it gave out beforehand ?

The future is a monstruous, powerful colossus that will soon fall on me and crush me.

- M.A.Orthofer, 17 January 2021

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Links:

• Farrar, Straus and Giroux publicity page
• Farrar, Straus and Giroux publicity page (The Copenhagen Trilogy)
• Penguin publicity page
• Penguin publicity page (Childhood, Youth, Dependency)
• Aufbau Verlag publicity page
• Gyldendal publicity page

• The Baffler*
• Books Past
• 4Columns*
• The Guardian*
• JacquiWine's Journal
• Heavenali**
• Kirkus Reviews*
• KVH Books
• Lonesome Reader
• Los Angeles Review of Books*
• The New Yorker*
• npr*
• The Observer*
• The Paris Review*
• Ploughshares*
• Reading and Watching the World*
• Radhika's Reading Retreat*
• Süddeutsche Zeitung* (German)
• Vox*

• Tove Ditlevsen at books and writers

• The Copenhagen Trilogy
  1. Childhood
  2. Youth
  3. Dependency

• See Index of Scandinavian literature
• See Index of Biographical works under review
• See Index of Series and Sequels under review

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About the Author:

       Danish author Tove Ditlevsen lived 1917 to 1976.

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© 2021 the complete review

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