Outside the Scope: More on Tove Ditlevsen
Reflection's on Early 2021's Breakout Old Book
I’ve been reviewing newly-released old books for about six months. It’s too early for me to make sweeping pronouncements on contemporary tastes, or the state of the publishing industry, but I can make some observations about book publicity.
Publicity for newly-released old books is not so different from publicity for newly-released new books, and most especially in the fact that most new books, of either kind, get basically no attention. I may have been the only person to write an in-depth review of either Epigrams from the Greek Anthology or In Remembrance of the Saints. Even The Hurly-Burly, published not by a university press but by an imprint of HarperCollins (itself a subsidiary of News Corp), only received a capsule review from Kirkus; its biggest piece of exposure came through an edited version of the introduction published in the New Yorker.
But now and again a book does break through, and in early 2021 that book was Tove Ditlevsen’s Copenhagen Trilogy. Reviews for the book appeared everywhere. It was recommended by both the Times Literary Supplement and Ava Huang’s substack. Even before its release, the Paris Review dedicated a column to its UK release. Scandinavia House organized a panel about the book featuring Ben Lerner, Rachel Kushner, and Morten Høi Jensen. In a Bookforum roundtable on the "risky books" its contributors would like to read, Christine Smallwood wrote, "I want to read more novels that make me feel like the end of The Copenhagen Trilogy—which is not a novel—did: shaking, sputtering, like I had just (barely) survived a car accident." Lit Hub’s Bookmarks section categorized 20 out of 21 reviews of The Copenhagen Trilogy as “Rave,” with only one being merely “Positive.”
Though I also raved about Ditlevsen’s book, I have to observe that some of the rhapsodizing was pedestrian in style. The New York Times classified it as “Grade A, top-shelf stuff” - as if great literature were merely a particularly high-end consumer product. The Paris Review column, nominally about "out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be," veered at times into bland publishing world gossip: “I found myself having lunch with a publicist from the Penguin Classics list here in the UK who was raving about their forthcoming reissue of the forgotten Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen’s ‘astonishing’ three-volume memoir, the Copenhagen Trilogy.”
I could not find a single negative, or even skeptical review, of The Copenhagen Trilogy (I will not look at Amazon or Goodreads). The lone review that was classified as merely positive by LitHub appeared in the Wall Street Journal, but the reservations the review expressed had less to do with the artistic quality of the book than the context of its publication: “the work now arrives in a pricy hardcover from the country’s most prestigious publishing house—50-year-old Danish esoterica refashioned into one of the most anticipated releases of the season.”
Lest you take that to be a brave jab against FSG’s marketing machine, note that “esoterica” is not quite the right word for a book by someone who was, and still is, among Denmark’s most famous authors. The review goes on to describe Ditlevsen's prose as "often monotonous" and its pace a "businesslike gait," but these are not, exactly, intended as criticisms - they are observations of her peculiar aesthetic effect.
I have no bitterness towards anyone who has written about The Copenhagen Trilogy. Many of the reviews were excellently written, and I see the amount of praise Ditlevsen’s autobiography has received not as the product of groupthink but of a genuine recognition of powerful literature.
Still, amid this unanimity of praise, it’s worth asking what a negative review of The Copenhagen Trilogy would look like. The prose sometimes falters. When Ditlevsen reflects on her mother’s attempts to stay youthful into middle age, she writes “these exertions fill me with a kind of compassion because they’re an expression of a kind of fear in her that I don’t understand.” I would guess that the choice to use three words ending in “ion” in two clauses was the fault of the translator, the repetition of “kind of” mostly the fault of Ditlevsen, and the awkward structure the fault of both author and translator.
But such failures of style would not be the reason a hypothetical reviewer would trash The Copenhagen. No, this reviewer would aim not at the occasional flaws in her style than a want of ambition with style. As versatile as Ditlevsen is with her prose, as much as she can modulate her voice depending on the circumstance, is her lucidity also something of a liability? Her sentences are never particularly complex, never require you to stretch your mind to find their meaning, and so we never feel we are fully in her head and privy to the shifts and tumult of her mind. We wince at her struggles with getting an abortion and falling into an addiction, but our reaction is that of a sympathetic admirer. Of her physical environs, of her position and relations to others, we understand clearly at each stage of her life, but of the development of her beliefs and the maturation of her emotions we get only an indistinct understanding. This is an autobiography written at a remove.
OK - I will abandon this thought exercise half-finished. I admire The Copenhagen Trilogy too much to manufacture a take-down I don’t believe in. What writing the above paragraph revealed to me is how incomplete The Copenhagen Trilogy would be without all three books. Ditlevsen’s style is one that is suited specifically to her life story, a story that goes from a fierce but hidden childhood ambition to an adulthood of permanent recovery. Had she lived a different life, she would have needed to write about it in a different way - or she would not have written her life at all, but used her time with a story completely of her own imagination.
Such is the depressing achievement of The Copenhagen Trilogy: its greatness is entwined with the addiction that caused her such suffering. We cannot help wondering what more she would have achieved without this calamity.