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Radhika&#;s Reading Retreat
Danish author Tove Ditlevsen became known to the wider world a couple of years ago when her stunning memoirs, The Copenhagen Trilogy, were released. With the dexterity of an alchemist turning minerals into gold, Ditlevsen mined her real life for raw material which she transformed into polished, haunting works of art. Those elements are very much on display in The Faces too, written around the same time as the memoirs.
Reality disappeared behind her like someone on a railway platform as the train pulls away.
The Faces is about a woman’s journey through mental illness and recovery, unique for its striking language and poetry in prose – all hallmarks of Ditlevsen’s writing.
Our protagonist Lise is a famous author of children’s books, although she hasn’t penned anything in the last two years. While professionally, a writer’s block has hampered her creative output, in her personal life too, Lise is on the edge. To her ex-husband Asger, “a wi • Childhood is the first in a series of three volumes which together form The Copenhagen Trilogy, a work of autofiction by the revered Danish writer and poet, Tove Ditlevsen (). It is a striking text, shot through with a tangible note of sadness, in which the innocence of childhood is juxtaposed with the harsh realities of an austere world. (The subsequent volumes – Youth and Dependency, which I’ll touch on at the end of this piece – cover the author’s adolescence and adult years respectively.) Born into a working-class family in a down-at-heel district of Copenhagen, Tove experiences a rather harsh and lonely childhood. With her love of books, songs and poems, Tove is considered somewhat unusual by her family – particularly her mother, whose intolerance and dismissive attitude give rise to a fractured mother-daughter relationship. Tove finds her childhood narrow and restricting, ‘like a coffin’ in which she is shackled and constrained. In search of solace and • I reviewed Philip Teir’s debut, A Winter War, back in when I described it as the perfect winter read, a book to tuck yourself up with. It may seem a little lazy but it’s hard to resist describing The Summer House as the perfect summer read. Set against a backdrop of a long holiday spent in the Finnish countryside, Teir’s second novel explores the dynamics of modern family life. While Julia packs up the car ready to drive to Mjölkviken, she wonders where Erik has got to, idly trying life as a single parent on for size. They drive off later than planned with ten-year-old Anton and twelve-year-old Alice, each with their own expectations and worries. Erik plans to find his way back into fatherhood after long hours spent working in the IT department of a Helsinki department store; Julia is avsikt on making headway with her second novel while the children fret about phone reception and how many new people they will be expected to meet. After an uneventful first week, with ingenting mor