The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen, Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2021

 

This trilogy of memoirs (individually titled Childhood, Youth and Dependency) was originally published in Denmark in the 1960s and 70s and only now translated and published in English.

They are unique and fascinating books, mostly because Tove Ditlevsen is a unique and fascinating person, and an original and captivating writer.  As a small child in an impoverished and emotionally repressed household, she takes a sudden interest in language and poetry, and vows to become a poet, a goal she quickly achieves by augmenting her talent with fierce ambition.  This drive to publish plays havoc with her personal life, and she ends up addicted to painkillers, a debilitating habit she seems unable to break.

All the attention paid to her drug dependency in the last volume causes her to lose all her agency and much of the reader's sympathy, and the world of the books, which heretofore was complex and engaging, loses dimension and becomes much less interesting.  As the sequence of titles suggests, this the rather sad story of fiercely autonomous child who loses her independence as she matures.