The Faces by Tove Ditlevsen,
translated by Tiina Nunnally
translated by Tiina Nunnally
The Trouble with Happiness: And Other Stories by Tove Ditlevsen,
translated by Michael Favala Goldman
translated by Michael Favala Goldman
The Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen’s Copenhagen trilogy is ostensibly a bildungsroman, the memoirs of a writer as a young woman. But the three books also record something more intimate: the persistent need to escape one’s circumstances.
In Childhood (1967), the young Tove, who was born in 1917, finds refuge from her petit-bourgeois family—a Gorky-loving father, an overbearing mother—in the gushy love poems she secretly composes in a notebook.
