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Elke Heidenreich
That might be mean, what I'm doing now, but look what I've built: this is Karl Ove Knausgård. 4590 pages: I, I, I. I actually read that. And not that badly at all. With a mixture of fascination and horror, how Karl Ove Knausgard bares himself to the bone. Almost 5,000 pages of almost toxic masculinity. And of course he also exposes everyone who lives with him. And that repelled and attracted me at the same time.
But now this: three narrow volumes about a woman's life. "Childhood", "Youth" and "Dependency". These two won't appear until February and this one is already here. Published by the Aufbau Verlag by a Dane Tove Ditlevsen. That is a total of 450 pages over a lifetime. Tove Dietlevsen was born in 1917 and committed suicide in 1976 at the age of 59. She grew up in Copenhagen, in a workers' settlement, and received no support from her parents. She describes this in a very shockingly beautiful book Childhood, how she longs for literature, for poetry. She writes poetry herself. She has a place on a windowsill in her bedroom. This is the only place where she is alone, where she can look out the window, think a little and secretly write her poetry. In the volume Jugend she describes how she actually sells her first poems. A literary magazine, how it takes a room, keeps afloat with terrible jobs and lives independently.
But "dependent" comes back again "dependency". This is then the third volume, in which she describes how she first met men, marriages, several marriages. And one of her men is a doctor and puts her on drugs, if you will, on pill addiction, stimulants, sleeping pills, so that she can write because she is plagued by self-doubt, fears and lack of self-confidence. That is what she describes in these three volumes. The third came out in 1971 and a few years later this beautiful, sensitive and talented woman was already dead. Look how she looked, Tove Ditlevsen. Can you show that? Yes. Be sure to read this. It is a book of incredible power. All three. How an artist personality emerges and how it is destroyed again and what language it develops. As she writes about the dark edge of fear in her life. As she quotes a teacher who says: "She looked at me like something that was found under a stone." What images and what a pull in her language. She describes childhood like this, I would like to read it out: “Childhood is long and narrow like a coffin from which one cannot free oneself alone. It clings to you like a smell. You notice them in others too. Every childhood smells different. Childhood is dark and it whines like a little animal that has been locked in a cellar and forgotten. It forms a cloud in front of the face, like cold breath. And sometimes it's too small and sometimes it's too big. It never fits exactly. "
These three books "Youth", "Childhood" and "Addiction" are of breathtaking intensity and beauty. And they show that something can actually become something out of a grayness out of which an artist struggles her way through and believes in her talent, even if she fails so tragically in the end that you are almost torn to pieces. She always comes across the wrong men. When she was 20, she stood by the mirror once and said: “I have the feeling that outside of these rooms the days for everyone else would rush away as if accompanied by drums and trumpets, while they sink down on me as imperceptibly as dust, a gray like the other. ”This work shines from the dust of her life. Tove Ditlevsen has to be rediscovered.
