tove-ditlevsen

The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen review – confessions of a literary outsider

The Danish writer reflects on success, addiction and divorces in three volumes of compulsive autofiction: Childhood, Youth and Dependency

tove-ditlevsen

Tove Ditlevsen. Photograph: Per Pejstrup/Press Association Images

For the four decades after the outbreak of the second world war, Tove Ditlevsen was one of Denmark’s most famous and extravagantly tortured writers, whose many identities – dreamy working-class misfit, ruthlessly focused artist, ambivalent wife and mother, literary outsider and drug addict – were constantly at war.

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Tiger by Polly Clark review – passionate tale of the wild under threat

In the three years since Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement berated literature for its failure to rise to the challenge of climate breakdown, fiction writers have made up for lost time. Indeed cli-fi, once a subset of science fiction, has been so quickly subsumed by realism that its days as a self-contained genre may be numbered.

The mass extinction of species has taken longer to percolate. While threatened ecosystems have sparked an explosion of powerful, elegiac non-fiction by Helen Macdonald, George Monbiot, Kathleen Jamie, Robert Macfarlane, Katharine Norbury and others, novels about wildlife have stuck largely to their traditional habitat of the children’s and young adult shelves.

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Hazards of Time Travel by Joyce Carol Oates

Time travel stories are seldom really about time, or travel, and Joyce Carol Oates’ 46th novel is no exception. Audacious, chilling and darkly playful, her thought experiment about belonging and otherness is quick to ignite, but admirably slow to reveal the full extent of its dystopian proposition.

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