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Dependency

The Copenhagen Trilogy: Book 3

Tove Ditlevsen; Translated from the Danish by Michael Favala Goldman

FSG Originals

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ISBN10: 0374539413
ISBN13: 9780374539412

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160 Pages

$14.00

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Tove is only twenty, but she's already famous, a published poet, and the wife of a much older literary editor. Her path in life seems set, yet she has no idea of the struggles ahead—love affairs, wanted and unwanted pregnancies, artistic failure, and destructive addiction. As the years go by, the central tension of Tove's life comes into painful focus: the terrible lure of dependency, in all its forms, and the possibility of living freely and fearlessly—as an artist on her own terms.

The final volume in the Copenhagen Trilogy, and arguably Ditlevsen's masterpiece, Dependency is a dark and blisteringly honest account of addiction, and the way out.

Reviews

Praise for Dependency

“How does great literature—the Grade A, top-shelf stuff—announce itself to the reader? . . . 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 . . . [The trilogy is] the product of a terrifying talent.”—Parul Sehgal, The New York Times

“The gradual submersion into addiction and madness is brilliantly accomplished . . . Like Tove herself, the reader is balanced on the surface of the moment, appallingly captive to events as they unfold. This sensation of immediacy—of presence—is what distinguishes The Copenhagen Trilogy from a great deal of contemporary autofiction . . . Ditlevsen’s writing is technically adroit yet feels unconscious, and it brings the reader remarkably close to experiencing the world through another person’s mind.”—Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

“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 . . . While Ditlevsen’s prose is often straightforward and uncomplicated, the effect is a hypnotic longing, the pull between desiring the life of an artist and wanting some sense of normalcy.”—Michele Filgate, The Boston Globe

“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. . . . Ditlevsen is a master of slow realization, quick characterization, and concise ironies.”—Lauren Oyler, Harper’s

“Mordant, vibrantly confessional . . . A masterpiece.”—Liz Jensen, The Guardian

“The best books I have read this year. These volumes slip in like a stiletto and do their work once inside. Thrilling.”—John Self, New Statesman

“Both [The Copenhagen Trilogy and Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels] depict, with first-hand grittiness and luminous subjectivity, bookish girls growing up in working-class districts, whether in 1950s Naples or 1930s Copenhagen. From an artistic viewpoint, Ditlevsen’s work is the more interesting . . . She looks the slimy and intolerable in the eye and burnishes it into cut glass. She’s a writer who, like Jean Rhys, explores the seamy ambiguities of female abjectionwith a voice whose power blasts through.”—Lucasta Miller, The Times Literary Supplement

“Astonishing, honest, entirely revealing and, in the end, devastating. Ditlevsen's trilogy is remarkable not only for its honesty and lyricism; these are books that journey deep into the darkest reaches of human experience and return, fatally wounded, but still eloquent.”—Alex Preston, Observer

“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 . . . But Ditlevsen’s brooding lyricism is all her own.”—Julie Phillips, 4Columns

“Tove Ditlevsen’s writing is both engulfing and totally controlled. She knows things about life. But just as important, she has a rare capacity to build from the tragic blocks of her life a perfect and eviscerating story. The greatness of her writing feels like an unsolvable mystery: far away, and up above.”—Rachel Kushner, author of The Mars Room

"Readers will find [Ditlevsen's] ruthless self-scrutiny both admirable and shocking."—Margaret Quamme, Booklist

"Memoir as confession—a powerful, psychologically astute work of self-examination and remembrance."Publishers Weekly (starred review)

BOOK EXCERPTS

Read an Excerpt

1


Everything in the living room is green – the carpet, the walls, the curtains – and I am always inside it, like in a picture. I wake up every morning around five o’clock and sit down on the edge of the bed to write, curling my...

About the author

Tove Ditlevsen; Translated from the Danish by Michael Favala Goldman

Tove Ditlevsen was born in 1917 in a working-class neighborhood in Copenhagen. Her first volume of poetry was published when she was in her early twenties and was followed by many more books, including the three volumes of the Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood (1967), Youth (1967), and Dependency (1971). She died in 1976.