I can really not claim that you´ve heard it here first - like so many times before, haha - but since I only started to read Rove Ditlevsen´s beautiful books last week I can tell you just now:

Go, get it! I read the first one of her memoirs, "Childhood", in two days, just started the second one - and I have to say: everything every critic around the world said is true.

Tove is the spiritual (grand)mother of Didier Eribon and Annie Ernaux - and also Ulla Hahn for that matter: Coming from a proletarain background and feeling the spirits of a writer within her from the very beginning.

Throughout her adult life, Ditlevsen struggled with alcohol and drug abuse, and she was admitted to a psychiatric hospital several times, a recurring theme in her later novels. In 1976, she died by suicide from an overdose of sleeping pills.

The classic literature circus had a hard time to accept her in the first place - but once they checked her modern, fine way of story telling they started to translate her into every possible language.

May I add how much I love the design of Germany´s Aufbau Verlag book version? Done by Anzinger & Rasp, an agency in Munich, I am happy to say that at the very end of my reading life German books start to look good...

www.anzingerundrasp.de

www.aufbau-verlag.de