What might seem in other writers a retroactive precocity is believable here. Ditlevsen is self-deprecating and effective at conveying the fish-eye view of a child in a claustrophobic environment; she understands that part of the memoirist’s job is to remember how life felt and synthesize it in a way she couldn’t have at the time.

The Copenhagen Trilogy and The Faces are very different books, but they draw on the same material—Ditlevsen’s life—and both display a distinctive style; an uncanny vividness; a gift for conveying atmospheres and mental sensations and personalities with remarkable dispatch; the originality and deadpan, trapdoor humor of the significantly estranged; a startling frankness; and a terrible commotion of unresolved conflicts and torments. Both books also accelerate from zero to sixty before anyone has a chance to buckle up.

Don’t think yourself odd if, after reading the Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen’s romantic, spiritually macabre, and ultimately devastating collection of memoirs, The Copenhagen Trilogy , you spend hours, if not days, in a reverie of alienation. It’s because the author, who died by her own hand in 1976, when she was fifty-eight, makes profound and exciting art out of estrangement.

... beautiful and fearless.

...one of Denmark’s most famous and extravagantly tortured writers, whose many identities—dreamy working-class misfit, ruthlessly focused artist, ambivalent wife and mother, literary outsider and drug addict—were constantly at war. While always the central protagonist in her dispatches from the frontline of her own life, she never pretended to be the heroine. Which makes it unsurprising that in an era with an appetite for autofiction, her mordant, vibrantly confessional autobiographical work should be experiencing a revival.

... majestic memoir of art and addiction.

Ditlevsen spent most of her adult life as a literary celebrity in her native country.

What Tove aspires to, even if only instinctually, is far beyond the scope of her mother’s experience and knowledge. Her mother’s aggression is not only the result of being reminded that certain facts of life are unalterable (such as having a daughter at a young age), but also, more importantly, the result of feeling that Tove can escape indisputable facts by turning to poetry.

Wrenching sadness and pitch-dark comedy regularly partner her swift progress from a cramped Copenhagen tenement to literary fame. Ditlevsen published these three compact memoirs between 1967 and 1971. They capture the naivety, terror and rapture of her early life across a fast-changing palette of prose colours.

I bring news of Tove Ditlevsen’s suite of memoirs with the kind of thrill and reluctance that tells me this must be a masterpiece.

Ditlevsen, as The Copenhagen Trilogy attests, refused to view the autobiographical text as a method of refining and distilling the self or granting it the long-view continuity a bloated project like Knausgaard’s My Struggle aims for. Resolution and synthesis were the lies of an average pen. Often described as a confessional writer, Ditlevsen seems implicitly to pose another, more urgent question: How exactly does one confess when the self is jagged, discontinuous, and prone to shifting with the wind?.

Ditlevsen's brilliance is evident.

... the three books...have an easy, natural cadence to them, as though they are being typed out in front of you.

Much of the power of Childhood comes from this precise, mature expression of the childish experience, so easily conveying the feeling (as well as acknowledging the childish inability to express it in any way clearly then—an inability-to-make-oneself-understood so common to that time in life).

There are some writers whose sentences sting like a steady stream of ice-cold water from the tap, and others whose prose feels pleasurably warm as they gradually increase the temperature. The Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen managed to do both.

Ditlevsen’s voice seems to reach us from a place of psychological remoteness. It is, at times, unnerving just how isolated she seems to be. Ditlevsen’s nonbiological relationships—with her friends, with her several husbands—feel contingent, as does her connection to the events of her own life.

Some books lodge themselves in your consciousness, threatening significance, before you’ve even read them. The sense that they might be of enormous personal value creates a combination of excitement and something like dread. Such was the case for me with Tove Ditlevsen’s Dependency.

The version of her child self that Ditlevsen offers us is naive, but likably so. She is certain of exactly what she wants, which is at first relatable, then attractive, and finally, in the end, devastating.

The gradual submersion into addiction and madness is brilliantly accomplished, though it’s a bitter, claustrophobic kind of excellence. Think of Jean Rhys rather than Proust—there are no poetic reveries about abjection here, no meandering modifying clauses. Ditlevsen writes firm, direct, often monotonous sentences that march the reader through the scenes at such a businesslike gait that one fails to notice just how far removed from rational behavior Tove has strayed.

They are the best books I have read this year. These very slim volumes slip in like a stiletto and do their work once inside. Each has its own distinct tone, which just about justifies Penguin’s money-chasing decision to issue the trilogy (around 350 pages in total) as three separate books.

The Copenhagen Trilogy is a sequence of her memoirs—the English translations are being issued in a single volume in the U.S.—remarkable in the way they privilege literature over life.

Ditlevsen is candid about the personal toll that the claustrophobic poverty of her early life had, though she does not extend this to any type of broader political argument. Though her family explicitly align themselves with the social democratic party, read socialist books, and appear steeped in an understanding of their class identity, Ditlevsen’s view is somewhat more individualized. Perhaps the connections between these early experiences and her troubled later life were meant to be obvious. If so, she might be surprised to find that many of these same challenges of the literary world—economic precarity, classism, insularity—persist today.

The intrusions of young Tove’s poetic compositions and the narrator’s poetic lens suffuse the memoirs with a distinct sense of larger-than-life-ness. The impressions given off by the scenes in this trilogy are reminiscent of the shadowy, sharply-contrasted portraits of Caravaggio: characters loom out of shadows, thrown into sharp relief. They are silhouetted, dramatic, and exaggerated, yet still squarely rooted within the realm of reality. Like the best autobiography, there is an irrefutability to Ditlevsen’s writing. This comes as a result of a near-perfect symbiosis between Ditlevsen’s style and her subject matter. Ditlevsen’s vision of her life’s story is so distinct, so assured, that reading her one is thoroughly convinced that not only did these events in her life happen, but that they happened exactly the way she recounts them. Of all the ways to tell these stories, we are convinced that this is the only possible way to tell them..

No one has written about childhood quite as memorably as the Danish poet Tove Ditlevsen, or described the compulsion to write with so much hope and foreboding. Her memoirs of growing up in working-class Copenhagen before the Second World War read like Ferrante meets Fierce Attachments, Vivian Gornick’s psychologically insightful memoir of maternal entanglement. But Ditlevsen’s brooding lyricism is all her own as she recalls the inner life of a sensitive child trying to parse her surroundings, comprehend an overwhelming, illogical mother, and appease her own exigent, unlikely gift..

What emerges in these pages—via exacting translations by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman—is an unblinking investigation of the self: its inconsistencies, its ties to others, its basic wish to be understood.

In her memoir, The Copenhagen Trilogy , [Ditlevsen] still commands the facts of her life with that same prolific, torrential force that has sprawled through dozens of texts, that tells of madness and poverty and femininity in the various violences they enact upon a single body—a fastidious discernment that is only concerned with what can be made material by ink and paper. In the reading of this monument to a life of letters, one is left with the sense that yes—a whole person is too much to take, in the way that anything, forced to be seen with such unimpeded clarity, is.

Readers will find her ruthless self-scrutiny both admirable and shocking..