Tove Ditlevsen’s Fragmentary Self

 

Tove Ditlevsen

Tove Ditlevsen’s Fragmentary Self

On the radical facticity of The Copenhagen Trilogy

The Copenhagen Trilogy  by Tove Ditlevsen, translated by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 384 pages.

Bailey Trela

January 25, 2021

IN AN ESSAY IN The New York Review of Books, Elizabeth Hardwick described Joan Didion as “a martyr of facticity,” characterizing her novels as elliptical, quick, and apt to self-crucify on acerbic details. This might just as well be applied to the works of the Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen, whose late-career autobiographical triptych, The Copenhagen Trilogy, was recently released by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

 

Fleur Jaeggy

Fleur Jaeggy’s Mourning Exercise

On the rain-soaked tribute of The Water Statues

The Water Statues by Fleur Jaeggy, trans. Gini Alhadeff. New Directions, 96 pages.

Bailey Trela
September 30, 2021

IN THE SUMMER OF 1971, the Swiss writer Fleur Jaeggy spent a month in Poveromo, a small village outside the town of Massa in Tuscany, with her friend, the Austrian novelist and poet Ingeborg Bachmann.