Tove Ditlevsen, trans. by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman
RaveThe Columbia ReviewThe intrusions of young Tove’s poetic compositions and the narrator’s poetic lens suffuse the memoirs with a distinct sense of larger-than-life-ness. The impressions given off by the scenes in this trilogy are reminiscent of the shadowy, sharply-contrasted portraits of Caravaggio: characters loom out of shadows, thrown into sharp relief. They are silhouetted, dramatic, and exaggerated, yet still squarely rooted within the realm of reality. Like the best autobiography, there is an irrefutability to Ditlevsen’s writing. This comes as a result of a near-perfect symbiosis between Ditlevsen’s style and her subject matter. Ditlevsen’s vision of her life’s story is so distinct, so assured, that reading her one is thoroughly convinced that not only did these events in her life happen, but that they happened exactly the way she recounts them. Of all the ways to tell these stories, we are convinced that this is the only possible way to tell them.
