Danish poet Tove Ditlevsen took her own life in 1976. A newly translated version of her three-part memoir traces the sometimes amusing, sometimes painful turns of her unconventional life.

Transcript

DAVE DAVIES, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. Our critic at large John Powers says he reads a lot of books that are good, but only a few make him go, wow. One of those is "The Copenhagen Trilogy," a memoir by the 20th-century Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen whose life was as messy as her books are controlled. John says "The Copenhagen Trilogy" belongs on the shelf of great books about women struggling to forge their own destiny.

JOHN POWERS, BYLINE: We're living in a golden age for women's writing. It's not simply that a good new female writer seems to emerge every time you look up, it's that the wheels of literary justice are finally giving due process to great women writers whose work has been forgotten, ignored or insufficiently appreciated. The latest revelation is Tove Ditlevsen, a Danish poet and fiction writer who had never even heard of until a few months ago.

In her native Denmark, Ditlevsen, who committed suicide in 1976, is a renowned author whose popularity survived the condescension of the male establishment. Her brilliance is evident when you read her confessional memoir, "The Copenhagen Trilogy," just out from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in a crisp translation by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman. Told in a sneakily plain, highly addictive voice, it's the portrait of the artist as a young woman who wrote as hard as she lived. When we first meet Tove, she's a girl living in the district of Copenhagen known as Vesterbro, with its reeking streets, prostitutes and endemic unemployment. While her father is principled, his progressive politics have limits. He insists that girls can't become poets. Her mother is an indolent beauty who's shifting moods Tove must constantly assess with the care of a lion tamer entering a cage.

In love with words, Tove dreams of being a poet and writing her way to freedom - not an easy task for a low-born girl in early 1930s Denmark. She has to start working at 14, taking jobs as a housekeeper, scullery maid and office clerk. By night, she writes the poetry that sustains her but that she fears will never see print. In fact, her writing does carry her away from Vesterbro, making her a success by her early 20s. She's even invited to dine with Evelyn Waugh. Yet for all her literary talent, she has little gift for daily living. Easily bored and fearing entrapment, Tove lurches through life. She goes on drunken revels with freedom-seeking girlfriends. She quickly racks up four husbands, dumping the three weak or pervy ones. She raises three kids, has a Christmastime abortion that haunts her, and finally, after an unnecessary surgery, gets hooked on the one thing she loves as much as writing - drugs.

Such a summary may make the book sound harsh or depressing, but oddly, it's the opposite. Many of Tove's escapades are amusing, especially in Volume 2. And even the account of her Demerol addiction has a clear-eyed briskness that sucks us in with its immediacy. Perhaps because she was a poet, Ditlevsen knows the eloquence of leaving things out. "The Copenhagen Trilogy" lies at the opposite end from Karl Ove Knausgard's "My Struggle," whose six volumes try to tell us everything about his life, no matter how pedestrian. Her entire trilogy clicks in at a cool 367 pages, a hundred fewer than the shortest volume of "My Struggle," though her struggle was far greater than his. Like Grace Paley and Alice Monroe, Ditlevsen's a master of compression who can capture the whole story of a marriage in a couple of pages. With a born writer's killer instinct, she likes to pounce on us with arresting chapter openings such as this first sentence about her second husband, Ebbe. Whenever I try to recall his face, she tells us, I always see him the way he looked that day I told him there was someone else.

"The Copenhagen Trilogy" is a story about escape - escape from menial work, escape from traditional female rules, escape from boredom, escape from reality and escape from the heavy weight of a self that was shaped in her childhood, a time she unforgettably compares to a long and narrow coffin. She has a self exploding with so many contradictions that she's like both heroines of Elena Ferrante's "Neopolitan" quartet merged into one. Tove says she hates change, then invariably flees whatever life she settled in. She insists she wants to be normal but chooses a painfully unconventional path. She keeps telling us that she's passive and powerless, yet what makes the book hopeful is that she's anything but. Even if writing couldn't save her from herself, it lets her soar above the world's expectations and seek the truth on her own terms.

DAVIES: Critic at large John Powers reviewed "The Copenhagen Trilogy" by Tove Ditlevsen. On tomorrow's show, Terry talks with Dr. Anthony Fauci, America's top infectious disease expert. He's now President Biden's chief medical adviser. They'll talk about new strains of the coronavirus, working with the Trump administration when the president didn't follow some of the scientific advice he was given and more. I hope you can join us.

FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering help from Charlie Kaier. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Amy Salit, Phyllis Myers, Sam Briger, Lauren Krenzel, Heidi Saman, Therese Madden, Ann Marie Baldonado, Thea Chaloner, Seth Kelley and Kayla Lattimore. Our associate producer of digital media is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. For Terry Gross, I'm Dave Davies. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.