Dependency: The Copenhagen Trilogy: Book 3 (The Copenhagen Trilogy, 3)

Dependency: The Copenhagen Trilogy: Book 3 (The Copenhagen Trilogy, 3)

The final volume in the renowned Danish poet Tove Ditlevsen?s autobiographical Copenhagen Trilogy ("A masterpiece" ?The Guardian). Following Childhood and Youth, Dependency is the searing portrait of a woman?s journey through love, friendship, ambition, and addiction, from one of Denmark?s most celebrated twentieth century writersTove 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.Review?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"A beautifully written and relatable chronicle for the marginalized." ?Patti Smith?Romantic, spiritually macabre, and ultimately devastating . . . Like a number of dispassionate, poetic modernists?the writers Jean Rhys and Octavia Butler, say, or the visual artists Alice Neel and Diane Arbus?Ditlevsen was marked, wounded, by her own sharp intelligence . . . A wonderfully destabilizing writer, she admits to something that a more timid memoirist would never cop to: monstrous self-interest. By baring her bathos along with her genius, she makes us reflect on our own egotism.? ?Hilton Als, The New Yorker?Read together, [the three volumes of The Copenhagen Trilogy] form a particular kind of masterpiece, one that helps fill a particular kind of void. The trilogy arrives like something found deep in an ancestor?s bureau drawer, a secret stashed away amid the socks and sachets and photos of dead lovers. The surprise isn?t just its ink-damp immediacy and vitality?the chapters have the quality of just-written diary entries, fluidly translated by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman?but that it exists at all.? ?Megan O?Grady, The New York Times Book Review?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?Ditlevsen's brilliance is evident . . . Like Grace Paley and Alice Munro, Ditlevsen's a master of compression who can capture the whole story of a marriage in a couple of pages. With a born writer's killer instinct, she likes to pounce on us with arresting chapter openings . . . She keeps telling us that she's passive and powerless, yet what makes the book hopeful is that she's anything but. Even if writing couldn't save her from herself, it lets her soar above the world's expectations and seek the truth on her own terms.? ?John Powers, NPR?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