"The Copenhagen Trilogy" by Tove Ditlevsen

The Copenhagen Trilogy is a collection of three short books by the Danish poet and author Ditlevsen, who was famous in her home country in the mid-20th century and died by suicide in 1976. Like most Americans, I had never heard of Ditlevsen, and though she acknowledges her success as an author in Trilogy, her professional success is not the real focus of the book. Instead, the book provides unusual insight into a complicated figure. She was extraordinarily ambitious and felt most at home when writing. We know she lived for her art, but of her art, we hear little. Instead, but most of the book focuses on her intimate relationships--her ambivalent relationship with her mother; her four husbands; and, finally, her drug addiction.

The first book in the trilogy, Childhood, has a foggy sense of helplessness. It reminded me intensely of the young narrators in Elena Ferrante novels, and I had to laugh when I read two reviews that both said the same thing. Youth is focused on her pursuit of romantic and professional success, though Ditlevsen doesn't separate the two much, as her first marriage is a sexless one to a much-older publisher. Dependency is the most affecting part of the novel, as her third husband Carl turns her into a drug addict and her life spirals. Ditlevsen describes this descent dispassionately. There's no attempt to turn herself into a victim or to ask for the reader's sympathy. Instead, she neutrally describes the absolute primacy of drug addiction in her life. It superseded everything, including her children and her work. She undergoes a needless surgery, which leaves her deaf in one ear, in order to secure more drugs. She has all the help money, fame, and love can provide, and none of it matters. Ditlevsen and her fourth husband have to flee Copenhagen to try to save her. On the last page she writes she was finally "rescued from [her] years of addiction," but even without foreknowledge of her suicide five years after the book's publication, the reader knows the assertion is hollow. Ditlevsen does too. After all, the book ends not with the generic absolution, but instead with this grim declaration: "the shadow of the old longing still returns faintly if I have to have a blood test, or if I pass a pharmacy window. It will never disappear completely for as long as I live" (370).

It was this chilling awareness that made the last third of the book so powerful for me. I've read a number of novels about addiction, but none with total clarity of Ditlevsen. She knows the destruction of the drugs. And she also knows she will not resist them if given the opportunity.

Ditlevsen is a complicated figure, and it's often hard to be sympathetic to her. She easily switches from one husband to the next, and she seems to care little for others, including her children. It would be interesting to hear, from an outside point of view, what made her so famous in Denmark, as there's nothing in the book to endear her to the reader. Yet The Copenhagen Trilogy is still a captivating read of a deeply troubled woman.