Youth: The Copenhagen Trilogy: Book 2 (The Copenhagen Trilogy, 2)

Youth: The Copenhagen Trilogy: Book 2 (The Copenhagen Trilogy, 2)

The acclaimed Danish poet Tove Ditlevsen?s autobiographical Copenhagen Trilogy ("A masterpiece" ?The Guardian) continues with Youth. Following Childhood, this second volume finds the young author consumed in trials by fire that only fuel her relentless passion for artistic freedom?placing her on a devastating and destructive path recounted in the final volume, Dependency.Forced to leave school early, Tove embarks on a checkered career in a string of low-paid, menial jobs. But she is hungry: for poetry, for love, for real life to begin. As Europe slides into war, she must navigate exploitative bosses, a Nazi landlady, and unwelcome sexual encounters on the road to hard-won independence. Yet she remains ruthlessly determined in the pursuit of her poetic vocation?until at last the miracle she has always dreamed of appears to be within reach.Youth, the second volume in the Copenhagen Trilogy, is a strikingly honest and immersive portrait of adolescence, filled with biting humor, vulnerability, and poeticism.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 ?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. It?s a bit like discovering that Lila and Len