Tove Ditlevsen (1917–1976)

I learned that Tove Ditlevsen's "Childhood" was an autobiography and not fiction only after I took at a look at its LibraryThing page. Of course, there's no telling how much of any autobiography is real and how much is fiction or, at the very least, the author's careful framing of their experience. But this slim book's pacing and structure are so effortlessly novelistic that the book often seems to inhabit a grey are between fiction and non-fiction. Lastly, even though the book tells the show more story of a hardscrabble childhood in Copenhagen between the wars, the author herself is something different from her peers: a sensitive soul who years to express herself through writing. Fittingly, the book is written in straightforward prose that describes the author's difficult situation veined with shockingly pretty descriptions and well-placed figurative language. While slightly dramatic teenagers who dream of a life in the arts will probably never be in short supply, the author almost managed to convince me that, even as a child, she was the real thing.

As one might expect of a book titled "Childhood," this one is also about loss and the passage of time. The younger Tove is, compared to many children in her neighborhood, relatively ignorant of the hard facts of sex and death. Still, the author made the passage that people of her social class took towards adulthood very clear: they either dropped out of school at fourteen and joined the working world or went on to high school. As the book closes her brother is training to become a journeyman painter and there are hardly any young women in the neighborhood that aren't pregnant or pushing bassinets. This might seem a bit strange to modern readers, as we live in an age when real adulthood, for many, has been pushed back to somewhere in one's thirties, but the author is smart enough to predict the probable paths her young adulthood will take and emotionally enough aware to mourn the passing of her childhood: she speaks at one point of it growing "threadbare." The fact that she is late to arrive at puberty only makes things more difficult for her, and sparks fears that she will be left between one state and another forever.

What all these futures have in common is that adulthood lies outside the family: being an adult means being "among other people." While her father and brother give young Tove a political education in a sort of romantic socialism, her difficult mother, who is prone to spiteful silences and fits of rage, teaches her how difficult human relationships can be. As Ditlevsen ends her autobiography, she has no potential suitors but has written a notebook's worth of love poetry. Although she's admirably ambitious, she's also painfully aware that her childhood has not given her much in the way of tools with which to achieve them. Recommended. I'll read the next one in this trilogy next month. show less

This is a memoir told from a familiar angle, growing up, becoming yourself, and trying to understand your family, but the voice feels like a unique perspective. And boy, it is bleak. I started Childhood in August and kept moving the book around with me. I’d return to it, but it felt too heavy every time I picked it up. It’s so real, and there isn’t much relief. The writing reflects experience so well, her mother’s love and distance, her self-awareness, and the slow formation of her show more identity. There are bits of hope, but mostly it’s neglect, poverty, abuse, addiction, loss, and generational trauma. The focus on addiction is devastating because it’s written with such clarity that the cycles feel inevitable. My heart hurt for the children, raised without the tenderness they needed. It’s beautifully written, and it refuses to flinch, but I’m flinching. It made me feel awful nearly the whole time. It’s powerful, and honest, and I understand why it’s endured. Read it, take care of yourself while you do. show less

Tove Ditlevsen’s bleak, emotionally disturbing stories zero in on moments of excruciating tension and vulnerability in the lives of ordinary people. The preponderance of Ditlevsen’s subject matter derives from the push-pull of domestic relationships, the power struggle of the male-female dynamic after long periods of co-habitation, or the breakdown of a connection that one presumes was at one time affectionate. In “The Umbrella,” Helga’s husband, resentful of her delight over show more acquiring a new umbrella, destroys the instrument as she looks on, an act that, in the bitter aftermath, Helga calmly accepts as she reflects that “everything was the way it was supposed to be.” “The Cat” relates a fraught tale of a couple who come into conflict when a stray cat joins the household, upsetting the domestic power balance and giving the wife the upper hand. “A Fine Business” describes a pregnant couple’s viewing of a house they want to buy, and the young mother-to-be’s guilt and sadness when her husband joins forces with the real estate agent to negotiate the price down, exploiting the female seller’s desperate need. In “Two Women” Britta, suffering from a case of frayed nerves brought on by her overbearing husband’s criticisms, seeks to restore her equilibrium at the beauty parlour. But when she sees the young hairdresser is upset, and then pries an admission from the girl that her husband has left her, Britta is not sympathetic but instead resentful that she must now share someone else’s burden of misery. In most of these stories it is the female partner who must cope with a moody, domineering husband. But in “The Trouble with Happiness,” it is the wife/mother’s judgmental presence that sets a tone of powerful negativity in the domestic setting, cancelling out all lightness and joy. Her husband copes by retreating, becoming a passive nonentity in his own home, and the daughter, who narrates, is counting down the days until her eighteenth birthday, when she will be free to live wherever and with whomever she wants. Conflict in Ditlevsen’s fiction sometimes arises suddenly and can be unexpected and unintentional. A mistimed smile or sidelong glance, or a casual remark, seems hurtful to the person on the receiving end, who then begins to see the other person differently. But more often than not she writes of people who have grown weary of each other and situations where love has withered and the relationship endures more because of inertia than anything else. Not for all tastes, but Tove Ditlevsen’s stories and novels, reminiscent of the work of British author Anna Kavan, deserve a place in any discussion of psychological realism in 20th-century European literature. show less

A well known author in her native Denmark, Tove Ditlevsen has only become well known outside of Denmark in recent years as the trend in autofiction has developed.

A work of 3 novellas, in The Copenhagen Trilogy Ditlevsen writes with brutal candour about three key phases in her life. In Childhood we observe the child Ditlevsen in 1920s Copenhagen as the burgeoning writer within her struggles to identify with the narrow horizons of her working class neighbourhood of blue collared workers. As show more her poetry career begins to take off, in Youth we begin to see how an upbringing filled with insecurity about being loved has shaped the young adult Ditlevsen, as she tumbles into the security blanket of a bizarre chaste marriage to a short and overweight much older bachelor who publishes her first poem and whom she later quickly leaves without a backward glance when she meets a young student who sets her pulse racing.

Whilst Childhood didn't overly work for me (it read as an intelligised adult's observation of childhood rather than childhood seen through the eyes of a child), once the trilogy moved into Youth I was hooked. A classic stereotype of a tortured and deeply self-absorbed writer, Ditlevsen spares no punches in her depiction of herself as someone who is only truly happy when writing about life and relationships yet remains largely unsentimental and emotionally detached when it comes to her own love affairs. When, in Dependency, she reluctantly returns to a medical student she had a one-night stand with to abort the child she's unsure is his or her husband's, an utterly bizarre sequence of events marks the abrupt end of her second marriage and the beginning of a car crash marriage to a psychotic doctor who nurtures her addiction to prescription opiates, an addiction which plagues the rest of her adult life along with deeply depressive episodes (which no doubt contributed to her suicide at age 58).

Ditlevsen is her own worst enemy throughout her life, truly at the mercy of her erratic artistic temperament and need for self-gratification without care or interest in the consequences. I'd be highly surprised if her writing didn't influence a young Karl Ove Knausgaard, for this trilogy feels like the birthplace of nordic autofiction. Despite its setting in the 1930s and 40s, this work reads as fresh as if it had been written yesterday, as Ditlevsen conforms to the expectations of no one and follows only her own impetuous desires.

4.5 stars - After a disappointing first volume, this ended up a compelling page-turner which I was sad to reach the end of. show less