Naming an autobiographical trilogy is a telling business. Tolstoy went straight down the line with Childhood; Boyhood; Youth. JM Coetzee started with Boyhood and Youth, but finished with Summertime, a pastoral title savagely ironic for its unflattering portrayal of the author’s late middle age. Tove Ditlevsen, one of Denmark’s most celebrated writers, was more subversive still. After Childhood and Youth, her final memoir was titled Gift, which in Danish means both married and poison. In English this has been rendered as Dependency; either way we have a title to make the reader wonder what lies beneath. The trilogy is now publish-ed in English in full for the first time, translated by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman.
To get it out of the way: they are the best books I have read this year. These very slim volumes slip in like a stiletto and do their work once inside. Each has its own distinct tone, which just about justifies Penguin’s money-chasing decision to issue the trilogy (around 350 pages in total) as three separate books.
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