The Danish Girl

The Danish Girl by David Ebershoff is a fictionalized account of Einar Wegener's transformation into Lili Eiber. When the model for his wife's current painting fails to show, Einar agrees to don the costume and pose in her place. And then he begins to realize he's more comfortable being a woman. Soon he is spending most of his time as Lili Eiber.

The book is set in Finland and in Pasadena, in flashback. Einar's wife was raised in Pasadena, California. I enjoyed seeing the city at the turn of the last century, through the early 1920s, through her memories. Her emersion in the California school of art (plein air painting of sweeping landscapes in bold colors) played against Einar's small, subdued landscapes that he had fallen out of habit of painting. Through their artwork, then, their relationship and personalities are introduced and explored.

I read The Danish Girl in the same weeks as Parrotfish — a YA novel about a female to male transgender teen. The striking difference between the two is the level of support Lili receives from her wife and their friends. How much support the actual Lili received, I don't know. As a story of support in a potentially difficult stage of life — it's a lovely novel. ( )

I loved this book. It's beautifully written and filled with precise, artful descriptions of places and people. Loosely based on a true story, it introduces us to Einar Wegener and his wife, Greta, both artists in 1920s Copenhagen. One day, Greta suggests that Einar help her complete a portrait by filling in for her female model. This suggestion opens the door to Einar's repressed past and hidden longings. Einar's transforms into Lili, the woman who has been inside of him all along. Through out this remarkable journey, Greta loves and supports Einar and Lili. While the novel has a lot to say about gender and identity, the most amazing part of it is the love between the two leads. Einar/Lili is a sympathetic character and Greta is even more clearly drawn, a woman of openness, compassion, and unending loyalty and love. The novel moves through Copenhagen, Paris, and Dresden in the 1920s and 30s. The settings are beautifully drawn but it's the portrait of a marriage in flux and the intimacy and trust between two people that makes the book outstanding. Last year, I read Ebershoff's The 19th Wife and I really liked it. The Danish Girl is very different in style and content, shorter and more straightforward, sticking to a conventional narrative structure. Sometimes simplicity is the best and, in my opinion, The Danish Girl is a much stronger novel than The 19th Wife. It's a breathtaking, bittersweet, and lovely novel, and I highly recommend it. Five stars. ( )

The imagined story of the personal life of Einar Wegener/ Lili Elbe and his wife Greta. This is truly a love story, with support and encouragement for a dream that Einar believes will make him the person he really is inside.
Ebershoff's settings are especially vivid, and the behind-the-scenes imaginings put a face and personality of what might be simply a name in an encyclopedia entry to many. There is an emotional distance between the reader and the characters (I never felt really close to them), but this may have been an intentional construct on the author's part - to make the story more palatable/acceptable to the masses. ( )

Einer Wegener was the first man to undergo a sex change operation, and he did so in the early 1930s. For years before that, however, he was Lili Elbe, still living with his wife Greta, who was supportive of his transformation into a woman. Ebershoff's The Danish Girl is very loosely based on Einer and Greta's life and should not be taken as anything other than fiction. I must say, however, that Ebershoff has done a wonderful job making the story sincere; it feels real, honest.

What fascinated me most was the dichotomy of Einer and Lili. They were presented as two distinct people by Ebershoff, treated as two distinct people by Einer's wife and friends, and Einer directly addressed the distinction, saying that Lili was a separate person living inside him. His was not a transformation; it was the death of one person so that another could live. Lili was not Einer, not who Einer wanted to be; she was an entirely new person and for her to have her own life, Einer had to cease to exist. Something about this way of looking at transgender feels sincere. Not only does it validate the life of the physical gender person, it acknowledges the life of the emotional gender person. Einer was not a stand in for Lili; he was his own man with his own life. And Lili was not Einer with a twist; she was her own person. Hmmm....I hope that made sense.

The real push of the book focused on the relationship between Greta and Einer and Greta and Lili. How Greta handled what for many would be an impossible and devastating situation is what kept me coming back to the book. How can a wife help her husband transform into a woman, knowing she will lose him completely in the end? I can't imagine being that supportive, that unselfish in my love, so I must admit that I had a bit of difficulty relating to Greta. For a bit of time in the story, I wondered if Greta was in fact falling in love with Lili. This is not supported by the book however.

Whether or not Greta was in love with Lili, she clearly did love her, as well as Einer. Many, including Ebershoff, classify this as a love story, and I completely agree. Love is complicated and diverse, and I felt the book portrayed the joy and pain well. This is a delicate story, carefully delving into a transformative experience. This delicacy can make the story feel a bit superficial, character motivations being a bit unclear at times, but I thought this worked well for the story as it created a feeling of uncertainty within the reader that mirrored the uncertainty of the characters.

In other news, The Danish Girl is being made into a film starring Nicole Kidman as Einer. I've heard Charlize Theron, Uma Thurman, and Gwyneth Paltrow as Gerda, so who knows for that role. Unfortunately, we will have to wait until 2012 to see the film. ( )

A novel based on the story of the first known male-to-female sex change sounds potentially off-putting, doesn't it? I can't say the premise of The Danish Girl grabbed me right off the bat. But author David Ebershoff's historical fiction The 19th Wife was my one of my Books of the Year for 2009, and a friend's strong review of this book, his first novel, made me re-think my position on reading it.

The transgendered have been with us for longer than we realize, and Danish painter Einar Wegener was the first to undergo a successful surgical sex change from male to female, living as Lili Elbe for several years until her death in the mid-1930's. Ebershoff used Lili's own diaries and letters as part of his research into this little-known bit of history, and has built it into a remarkably moving and enlightening story.

Ebershoff's writing is very descriptive and the pace of the novel is almost languid at times, but it reads surprisingly quickly. The narration is in the third person, shifting perspective between Einar/Lili and Einar's American-born wife Greta. This provides insight into the characters and their situation from different angles, but also kept me as a reader at a slight emotional distance - not far enough to make it difficult to connect, but as if to prevent excessive intimacy.

And this is a very intimate story - not in the sense of graphic physical details (there are far fewer than one might expect), but in the way it explores the emotional makeup of two people in a marriage that's becoming more unusual by the day. This is as much Greta's story as Einar/Lili's, and in some ways she comes across most vividly. I believe that no one really knows what goes on within a marriage except the people in it, and in the Wegeners' case that may be truer than most. They have a genuine connection to one another that holds even as their relationship irrevocably changes.

The Danish Girl is a fascinating and beautiful novel. ( )