Dependency: The End of the Copenhague Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen

 

Dependency, a story of romance, motherhood and opioid addictions, is the closing chapter of the Copenhague Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen. 

Although the memoir in its entirety is calculately cold and is rather focused on the succession of events than on exploring internal emotional experiences, there is always a value in sharing one´s story. Within this framework, her writing is a permanent companion, although in this third installment, is rather an acknowledged reality. 

In Dependency - the title in Danish was Gift, which can mean either ´poison´ or ´married´ - she is working to her novel, an activity which makes her happy. Her spirit though is progressively becoming attached to a body craving opioids. While having an abortion she experiences Demerol that she will continue to take thereafter. Her Romantic relationship - an alcoholic, much older second husband, a fourth husband that seems to help her reducing the dependency. There are children, with different husbands, and a new chance for love that may heal her.

As in the previous volumes, the voice is rather neutral, as she is the chronicler of her own life, whose benchmarks she is carefully observing and further sharing with the rest of the world. There is a big difference in memorialistic style between Ditlevsen and the memoirs we are using nowadays. Instead of trying to understand herself and the world, she rather is recreating the timeline of the events, as an effort against the vanishing time.

Although I´ve read the three sequencies with a big timespan between but chronologically, reading them at once is rather a better solution as one can observe closely the different evolutions and changes the author went through. It also shares social and political episodes from the recent Danish history, despite the fact that there are less present in this last volume.

I had access to the books in the German translation from Danish by Ursel Allenstein. 

Rating: 3.5 stars

Book Review: Childhood by Tove Ditlevsen translated into German by Ursel Allenstein

Childhood as a joyful, happy, comfortable, free of pain and evolving in an almost perfect family friendly environment is representative for a very small amount of people around the world. Particularly decades ago, growing up as a child in a Europe at the brink of wars, industrial revolutions and economic and social changes was far from being any where close of a Disney storytale.

The memoir of Tove Ditlevsen, one of the most famous Danish authors, who died by suicide in 1976, reveals serial realistic memories of growing up in Copenhague, as a second child of a working class family at the beginning of the 20th century. The first installment of the Copenhague Trilogy - which includes Childhood, Youth, and Dependency - is a candid yet thoughtful account of her beginning, until the age of 14 - shortly after the confirmation age.

I had access to the book, translated into German from Danish by Ursel Allenstein, in audiobook format, read by the actress Dagmar Manzel which offered an excellent rendition in terms of emotional interpretation of the content. 

The earliest memories start at the age of 5 and will be updated until the age of 14, when she is about to get a job as a literary contributor but her poetry is rejected because of its loaded erotic content. Besides the inerent sociological aspects of the writing - her father was a communist and therefore have been often left jobless, the times of social and economic insecurity, the gender-biased treatment of her and her brother etc., Ditlevsen´s account has the power of freeing her. Those memories of memories are a reflection of her changes, expectations and observations about her feelings and her body. As for this first part of the memoir, she is more adding up the observations than filtering the reality through sharp rational categories. Given the role of the writing at this stage, adding up words contributes to creating that feeling of freedom that may be at a certain point a counter-point to the sadness and dramatic way of reading the world.

Childhood is a book with strong social and socialist roots, realistic and politely direct. It does not break limits or aims at changing the world, but cannot avoid sharing the reality as it appears to her through her life experience and those of the people around her. 

Personally, I am curious about the rest of the trilogy as well and I am glad that I had the chance to start it somehow.

Rating: 4 stars

Book Review: Jugend by Tove Ditlevsen translated into German by Ursel Allenstein

 

I continued exploring the Copenhague Trilogy with the next volume covering the ´young years´ of Tove Ditlevsen, as she is about to move away from home and has her first poem published. The book starts with her first working day - which may be the last too - but continues with her fine observations of Denmark at war, the social precarity surrounding her and her new human and self-discoveries.

There are many elements that at this age it´s hard to come to pieces altogether in real life, even harder within the literary realm. In Youth/Jugend, as I read the book in the German translation from Danish by Ursel Allenstein, the voice is curious as what is happening to her is not necessarily planned, although she is working hard toward it. There is that impulse of the youth towards the world and its people, something that maybe later will be consider as ´mistakes´ but right now it is just pure desire - to discover, explore, try. In a way that makes you curious to see what will finally happen to Tove in the next - and last - volume.

Her voice resonate with the style of contemporary memoir writers, like Rachel Cusk which testifies that memoir writing is not a matter of timebounded style but, as some may expect, of personality. A mindset that may transcend times and centuries in the name of literature is a curious journey in itself.

Rating: 4 stars