The Faces

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 is an award-winning translator and author. She translates works from Danish, Norwegian and Swedish. She was awarded the prostigeous PEN Translation Prize in 2001.

Auteur
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 is an award-winning translator (from Danish, Norwegian and Swedish) and novelist. She was awarded the prestigious PEN Translation Prize in 2001 for her translation of the third volume of Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter, and her translations of Hans Christian Andersen and Tove Ditlevsen for Penguin Classics have been widely praised.

Texte du rabat
'One of Denmark's most celebrated writers' New StatesmanFrom the acclaimed author of the Copenhagen Trilogy, a searing, haunting novel of a woman on the edge, portrayed with all the vividness of lived experience. Copenhagen, 1968. Lise, a children's book writer and married mother of three, is increasingly haunted by disembodied faces and voices. She is convinced that her husband, already extravagantly unfaithful, will leave her. Most of all, she is scared that she will never write again. Yet as she descends into a world of pills and hospitals, she begins to wonder, is insanity really something to be feared, or does it bring a kind of freedom?'Ditlevsen explores 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 TimesTranslated by Tiina Nunnally

Résumé

'One of Denmark's most celebrated writers' *New Statesman

• From the acclaimed author of the Copenhagen Trilogy, a searing, haunting novel of a woman on the edge, portrayed with all the vividness of lived experience.

Copenhagen, 1968. Lise, a children's book writer and married mother of three, is increasingly haunted by disembodied faces and voices. She is convinced that her husband, already extravagantly unfaithful, will leave her. Most of all, she is scared that she will never write again. Yet as she descends into a world of pills and hospitals, she begins to wonder, is insanity really something to be feared, or does it bring a kind of freedom?

'Ditlevsen explores 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

• Translated by Tiina Nunnally