The Copenhagen Trilogy

Childhood; Youth; Dependency

By: Tove Ditlevsen, Tiina Nunnally - translator, Michael Favala Goldman - translator

Narrated by: Stine Wintlev

Length: 11 hrs and 52 mins

Publisher's summary

2021 New York Times Book Review Notable Books of the Year
2021 NPR Best Book of the Year
2021 The New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year
2021 Financial Times Books of the Year

Called "a masterpiece" by The Guardian, this courageous and honest trilogy from Tove Ditlevsen, a pioneer in the field of genre-bending confessional writing, explores themes of family, sex, motherhood, abortion, addiction, and being an artist. This program contains all three volumes of her memoirs.

Tove Ditlevsen is today celebrated as one of the most important and unique voices in 20th-century Danish literature, and The Copenhagen Trilogy (1969-71) is her acknowledged masterpiece. Childhood tells the story of a misfit child’s single-minded determination to become a poet; Youth describes her early experiences of sex, work, and independence. Dependency picks up the story as the narrator embarks on the first of her four marriages and goes on to describe her horrible descent into drug addiction, enabled by her sinister, gaslighting doctor husband.

Throughout, the narrator grapples with the tension between her vocation as a writer and her competing roles as daughter, wife, mother, and drug addict, and she writes about female experience and identity in a way that feels very fresh and pertinent to today’s discussions around feminism. Ditlevsen’s trilogy is remarkable for its intensity and its immersive depiction of a world of complex female friendships, family, and growing up - in this sense, it’s Copenhagen's answer to Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels. She can also be seen as a spiritual forerunner of confessional writers like Karl Ove Knausgaard, Annie Ernaux, Rachel Cusk, and Deborah Levy. Her trilogy is drawn from her own experiences but unfolds like the most compelling kind of fiction.

Born in a working-class neighborhood in Copenhagen in 1917, Ditlevsen became famous for her poetry while still a teenager and went on to write novels, stories, and memoirs before committing suicide in 1976. Having been dismissed by the critical establishment in her lifetime as a working-class female writer, she is now being rediscovered and championed as one of Denmark's most important modern authors, with "Tove fever" gripping audiences.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux

©2021 Tove Ditlevsen (P)2021 Macmillan Audio

Beautiful

I loved this trilogy and the reader. I could listen to the reader all day!

The best novel I have ever read

I don’t know where to begin, no amount of writing can describe the emotion you get from this book. I was told to read this from my professor if I liked a book that made you sit and think. This book is filled will so many emotions, it’s almost as if you become great friends with Tove (Author) but your in a glass wall, and you can’t tell her anything you really need to. Read it, you won’t be disappointed.

audio great

took time but fell in love with the voice story and the poetry .
copenhagen life through the eyes of a young female poet. Youth, adolescence, addiction told in observational prose.

exemplary

so damned good. in my top 10 books to give to the aliens for sure.

Raw and real

The writing in the first two parts is exquisite. The reader is pitch perfect. The last part of the trilogy, though well written, is not as strong as the first two.

Danish Ferante?

I was as absorbed in this trilogy and the life of poet: author Ditlevsen as I was with Elena Ferante’s My Brilliant Friend. Except this is all true it seems so my responses of kinship, anger, disgust and concern for the writer as she lurches toward fame and fulfillment is also more real. Loved the reader, too!

A mesmerizing memoir

A truly interesting look into a woman and her life. As we've learned here in the United States, she's a national hero in Denmark. This text shows why. With an unflinching sense of honesty, she takes us through three phases of her life. While I wasn't enthralled by the narrator, the books themselves more than made up for it.

Wonderful, if not a little heartbreaking.

One word of warning: if you, like me, struggle with “mouth sounds” and saliva noises, the narration can at times be a little tough.

Beyond that, this was a wonderful, fascinating, and devastating journey to go on, and I highly it.

Added to one of my favorites

Got this one after I read a newsletter review saying that there was no need to read reviews nor the back cover,
Just start reading, you will not put it down.

Tough memoir, well told.

She writes about her life in simple, almost dry phrases. But the Overall effect is fascinating. It is also interesting to hear the reader, Stine Wintlev, pronounce the Danish names and places. Well worth a listen!