From the Publisher
"Ditlevsen can conjure an entire world in just a few words.”
—Tabish Khair, The Times Literary Supplement
“[Ditlevsen’s] legacy endures with this collection of short stories . . . Beautifully crafted.”
—Angela Haupt, TIME
"Quiet and devastating . . . The stories are simple; the characters ordinary and immensely human. Their motivations are mysterious and subtle, and Ditlevsen is acutely sensitive to the way normal life can wear at their hearts . . . Already renowned for her memoirs, Ditlevsen is now poised to win acclaim as a master of short fiction."
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A central work of modern Danish literature."
—Kirkus Reviews
“[A] literary titan . . . [Ditlevsen’s] terse, unnerving stories peer into the fragility of relationships and the casual epiphanies that gut her characters.”
—Oprah Daily (Most Anticipated Books of 2022)
"These spare and sparkling stories summon deep wells of emotion without the slightest trace of sentimentality.”
—Chloe Schama, VOGUE
“These collected short stories show off [Ditlevsen’s] astonishingly precise prose.”
—Ellen Peirson-Hagger,The New Statesman
Kirkus Reviews
2022-01-12
A brooding collection of stories by the iconic Danish writer.
Ditlevsen, who died in 1976, was no stranger to misery: Addicted to drugs and alcohol, she was committed to psychiatric care several times. Many of the characters she depicts in this slender volume of stories could use professional care themselves. In the opening story, a young woman who “had never demonstrated a special talent of any kind” longs for just two things in life: a man and an umbrella. She attains the first, but the second is slower to arrive. “Sometimes she would lie awake next to Egon, or in her bed in the maid’s room in the house where she worked, nursing her peculiar dream of owning an umbrella,” writes Ditlevsen, and when the woman finally does pull the money together to buy an inexpensive bumbershoot, her enraged husband breaks it over his knee. There the story ends, and one can imagine the couple living miserably ever after. In another story, an aging woman despises any reminder that she will one day die yet introduces a prospective daughter-in-law to everyone in her family, the dead by way of photographs, knowing that one day she’ll be reduced to a few memories and a photo on her sewing table. A botched abortion here, an affair there, a child who, though only 7, “already possessed a great deal of formless anxiety,” a father considered nice only because he does not beat his children—these are the people and events that populate Ditlevsen’s unhappy world. About the only promise of redemption comes in the title story, in which a young woman who inhabits a dank corner of a tiny apartment with her parents, her father “completely superfluous in my mother’s world,” works herself through sheer will into a career as a writer. If this small, gloomy piece is a roman à clef, then Ditlevsen deserves every bit of the reader’s sympathy.
Neurasthenic and melancholic but a central work of modern Danish literature.
