Literary criticism is, in an intrinsic way, subject to what one could call a dictatorship of the present, that is to say devoted exclusively to literary novelties. But we don’t make rules without exception, and that’s what we are reminded The Copenhagen trilogyby Tove Ditlevsen, whose recent translation presents itself as a delightful paradox, since it embodies both a literary novelty and a treasure unearthed from the last century.
The Danish trilogy was published between 1967 and 1971. Why was it shelved then? The autofictional character, moreover from a female point of view, would apparently be in question. In 1976, Tove Ditlevsen took her own life. She was 58 years old. She is reborn to us today, through the narration of her childhood.
In the working-class district of Vesterbro, on Istedgade Street, deep in young Tove’s childhood, “there is [s] we father laughing.” He is proletarian and socialist, and unemployment lies deep in his pockets. It must be said that poverty is everywhere, condemning the future of her family as well as that of the neighbors whom the young girl takes pleasure in observing.
Life is a mystery to be deciphered, and other people’s secrets are a cure for boredom. She wants so much the love of her mother, but she is unpredictable, “beautiful, inaccessible, solitary and overflowing with secret thoughts that[elle] does not decipher [ra] Never “. Fortunately there is Edvin, his brother, and Ruth, his precious friend, for whom “adults have no secrets”.
In a universe reminiscent of that of The wonderful friend of Elena Ferrante and, in some respects, The breath of Harmattan by Sylvain Trudel, the Danish writer depicts with acid cheerfulness a cycle of misery where life reveals itself, as raw as it is cruel. “Childhood is long and narrow like a coffin,” she writes.
Little by little, she pushes back the boundaries of her territory and encounters new realities, which she contemplates with ingenuous lucidity and depicts with her sharp pen: “A prostitute is a lady who does it for money, which seems much more understandable to me than doing it for free. »
His words are incandescent and his formulas summon all the senses, unscrupulously attacking the heart and the reason. Everyday life is a firebrand and one can only get burned in it, but she knows how to unearth and render its beauty, starting with that of Istedgade, the street of her childhood, to which she swore loyalty, where the street lamps “shine like great benevolent sunflowers” and whose artery stretches through the city “like a very beautiful woman lying on her back, her hair overflowing”.
It was on this street, precisely, that we found her. The one who, long before her time, had surrounded the blank page with her lucidity and spied “in secret on adults, whose childhood lies inside them, all tattered and with holes like a worn carpet”. It took sixty years to recognize it, and here it is finally offered to us, with the promise of two other volumes to come. Life, sometimes, is a posthumous celebration.