Author(s): Tove Ditlevsen

Novel | Read our reviews! | Translated fiction | Scandinavia

Copenhagen, 1968. Lise, a children's book writer and married mother of three, is becoming increasingly haunted by disembodied faces and taunting voices. Convinced that her housekeeper and husband are plotting against her, she descends into a terrifying world of sickness, pills and institutionalization. But is sanity in fact a kind of sickness? And might mental illness itself lead to enlightenment?

Brief, intense and haunting, Ditlevsen's novel recreates the experience of madness from the inside, with all the vividness of lived experience.

The fact that Ditlevsen was herself one of insanity's intimates does much to explain this book's harrowing authenticity. But The Faces - in Tiina Nunnally's very deliberate, close-to-the-nerve translation - rises above a case study because, working from the inside, Ditlevsen is able to explore the surprising contours of Lise's experience: from her point of view, madness can be funny, soft and secure, and far more enlightening than the "reality" it struggles to evade * The New York Times *
A searing but never sensational account of a usually hyped theme - the struggle of the artist to do her work, without guilt about family or the outside world. Admirably without self-pity, and often ironic, Ditlevsen is a voice to heed * Kirkus *
these are the best books I have read this year 'Praise for the Copenhagen Trilogy' -- John Self * New Statesman *
Mordant, vibrantly confessional... A masterpiece 'Praise for the Copenhagen Trilogy' * Guardian *
Wrenching sadness and pitch-black comedy ... Sharp, tough and tender 'Praise for the Copenhagen Trilogy' -- Boyd Tonkin * Spectator *
An inspired pick, especially for those readers whose introduction to Ditlevsen's work has been the Copenhagen Trilogy * Paris Review *

Author Biography: Tove Ditlevsen (Author) Tove Ditlevsen was born in 1917 in a working-class neighbourhood in Copenhagen. Her first volume of poetry was published when she was in her early twenties, and was followed by many more books, including her three brilliant volumes of memoir, Childhood (1967), Youth (1967) and Dependency (1971). She married four times and struggled with alcohol and drug abuse throughout her adult life until her death by suicide in 1978. Tiina Nunnally (Translator) Tiina Nunnally is an award-winning translator and author. She translates works from Danish, Norwegian and Swedish. She was awarded the prestigeous PEN Translation Prize in 2001 and has been widely acclaimed for her translations of Danish author Tove Ditlevsen.

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THOMAS'S REVIEW:

After all, he thought, a face is created by the person who sees it, not by the person it is seen upon; our faces belong to those who perceive us just as our identities exist only in the minds of those who perceive us; we rely upon those who perceive us. To see oneself in the mirror, he thought, is at once the most familiar and the strangest thing, possibly even a dangerous thing, now that he thought about it, or a thing anyway not without its dangers. We have no reliable identity, he thought, nothing definitive or stable, except what is achieved, if achieved is the right word, through the extent of laziness that the person who perceives us applies, or does not apply, as the case may be, in falling back upon a previous conception, or preconception, of what they may think of as us. Not entirely a clear thought, he thought. Faces have trouble staying where they belong in Tove Ditlevsen’s The Faces, or, rather, Lise has trouble keeping the faces of others where they belong. “You have to watch over them all the time, thought Lise, full of anxiety, and make them play their roles. … They noticed if you neglected them for a moment and thought your own thoughts. … Then they would take revenge and start to live for themselves.” In the first part of the book, when Lise is living at home with her three children, her partner Gert, and the housekeeper Gitte—who is affordable thanks to a literary prize won by Lise. Gert resents Lise’s independent successes, and is flagrantly unfaithful to her. As Lise is struggling to hold her world together mentally (“Life consisted of a series of minute, imperceptible events, and you could lose control if you overlooked a single one of them.”), the text is full of similes, evidence either of the associative compulsion with which Lise desperately tries to retain conceptual control, or of the associative compulsion which continually assails the stability of that world by likening its contents to things that they are not. Who knows which, he thought, but in any case similes are always a sign of mental instability. After Gert’s lover Grete commits suicide by overdosing on sleeping pills, Lise becomes convinced that Gert and Gitte are conspiring for her to do the same. “Was he still thinking about his dead mistress?” wonders Lise. “She didn’t think so because, all things considered, his strength lay in his lack of imagination.” Lise does overdose, rings the ambulance, and wakes up in a psychiatric hospital, strapped to a bed. At the hospital the similes fall away from the text, no longer of any use in holding off a breakdown (or having done their work in inducing one). At the hospital things are what they are. Lise’s torments as she lies there, the nurses attending to her wearing the faces of Gitte and Gert, speaking sometimes ‘as’ Gitte and Gert, and the voices and faces, also including those of her children, continuing to appear to her through the grilles in the wall of her room (the ‘negotiation’ grille and the ‘torture’ grille), culminate in Lise believing that she is ‘allowing’ acid to be thrown into the face of her youngest son. At this point Lise believes herself to be finally acutally insane, but it is from this point that the doctor considers that she is starting to recover. Indifference is the cardinal property of sanity, after all, and as Lise becomes more indifferent she gets closer to the point of returning home. The faces tell her, after she learns that Gitte has left the household, that Gert is keeping her in the hospital so that he can marry her teenage daughter (not his daughter). Was Lise’s intuition of Gert’s possible sexual intrusion upon her daughter the unfaceable catalyst for her breakdown? After Lise is released, Gert does not clearly deny that such a thing has occurred, but the indifference that Lise has learned in her ‘revovery’ and the doubts that she has been induced to develop in her own judgement and in her own memories in the same process means that she returns to her life in a narrowed and more fragile way, heading into life’s quotidian horrors with no defence but indifference. How and at what cost can that indifference be maintained?