JimZ's Reviews > The Faces

I very much liked Tove Ditlevsen’s 3-volume memoir ‘Childhood, Youth, Dependency’...I read it last year and gave it 4.5 stars. The last volume was about her addiction to painkillers and that made for very uncomfortable reading, and her being married to a low life as part of that period in her life. So, I guess I should have been warned about this novel and its dark subject matter — a woman having a psychotic breakdown and thinking the most godawful thoughts and thinking they were reality. At least for me, I didn’t much appreciate it. Maybe if I had been prepared for a Debbie-Downer book I would have appreciated it, while acknowledging the sad and sorry and troubling subject matter. That said, I am not going to rate it...I think it is probably a good book and I just came into it not wanting to read such a book/not being prepared for it. All the reviews below had positive things to say about the novel while recognizing its dark subject matter.

Note:
• I read a short story of hers in the New Yorker last year (The Umbrella, October 25, 2021), and that is included in a collection of her short stories that has come out this year —“The Trouble with Happiness,” translated, from the Danish, by Michael Favala Goldman. — published by Penguin.

• From Wikipedia: Throughout her adult life, Ditlevsen struggled with alcohol and drug abuse, and she was admitted to a psychiatric hospital several times, a recurring theme in her later novels. In 1976, she died by suicide from an overdose of sleeping pills.

Reviews:
• https://www.theguardian.com/books/202...
• https://tonysreadinglist.wordpress.co...
• https://anokatony.wordpress.com/2021/...