Vilhelm's Room - by Tove Ditlevsen (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

A searing final novel about the collapse of a marriage and its aftermath, by the author of the modern classic Copenhagen Trilogy.

I want to write a book about Vilhelm's room and the events which took place in it, or arose from it; those that led to Lise's death, which I have survived only so that I might write down the story of her and Vilhelm . . .

The ripples from a breakup radiate outward from the room where a married couple once loved each other, and a bizarre Lonely Hearts ad sets off a train of tragicomic events that leads to an inevitable conclusion. Vilhelm's Room, Tove Ditlevsen's final novel--published a year before her untimely death in 1976--is a powerful conclusion to an extraordinary life as a poet, novelist, and memoirist: a blackly funny and devastating tour de force that pulses with life even as it journeys toward death.

Review Quotes

"Reading Vilhelm's Room, the final novel from the great Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen, what hits you first is how wonderful her sentences are . . . Ditlevsen's unusual way of seeing the world, and her sprightly humour, run throughout this short book . . . Vilhelm's Room is a beguiling, often confounding novel from one of the 20th century's most original writers." --Ellen Peirson-Hagger, The Guardian

"Ditlevsen makes this darkest of all material fascinating, perversely likable and occasionally revelatory. She's a brilliant writer and formidable thinker . . . a unique and powerful document of catastrophic mental illness." --Sandra Newman, The Guardian

About the Author

Tove Ditlevsen was born in 1917 in a working-class neighborhood in Copenhagen. Her first volume of poetry was published when she was in her early twenties and was followed by many more books, including the three volumes of The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood (1967), Youth (1967), and Dependency (1971). She died in 1976.

Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell are translators living in Copenhagen. Together, they have translated fiction and poetry by Danish writers such as Olga Ravn, Tove Ditlevsen, and Solvej Balle.