Tove Ditlevsen’s beguiling autofiction

Reading Vilhelm’s Room, the final novel from the great Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen, what hits you first is how wonderful her sentences are: “A brown suede coat ambled through the rain-soaked streets, which were slippery and shiny like eels,” she writes. At another point, she describes a character sitting “at the oval table she had inherited from her late grandmother, on a velvet-upholstered chair adorned with cross-stitch embroidery sewn by her still very much alive mother”. Ditlevsen’s unusual way of seeing the world, and her sprightly humour, run throughout this short book.

The second thing that strikes you is the strangeness of the story. The book concerns poet Lise Mundus and the breakdown of her marriage to Vilhelm, “Denmark’s tabloid mogul”. For part of the novel, Lise is staying in a psychiatric unit, where she writes a lonely hearts advert. It is answered by Kurt, a lodger living in the apartment above Lise’s. Once she is released from the “locked ward for madwomen”, the pair meet and he moves into her husband’s room, starts sleeping in his bed, wearing his clothes, reading his diaries.

Vilhelm’s Room was first published in Danish in 1975, a year before Ditlevsen’s death by suicide, and now appears in English for the first time in a spirited translation by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell. Ditlevsen was born in Copenhagen in 1917, published her first poems in her twenties and became one of Denmark’s best-known writers. Since the 2019 English publication of her autobiographical works, known collectively as the Copenhagen Trilogy, her writing has been celebrated in the Anglophone world for its idiosyncratic depictions of love, addiction and mental illness.

Vilhelm’s Room is undoubtedly autofiction, dealing as it does with a nationally renowned author who suffers with substance abuse issues throughout her life. But it’s a more chaotic reading experience than the comparatively straightforward Copenhagen Trilogy.

Here, the book’s narrator writes about Lise and Vilhelm in the third person, though she also makes some first-person appearances herself. At different points in the novel she is omniscient, a neighbour of the couple, and Lise and Vilhelm themselves. “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. There is no other meaning to my life,” she declares, with some grandeur. Yet, a few pages later, she describes the photos that remained in the apartment after the couple had left it: “Only one I have kept: the photograph of Vilhelm and Lise at the top of Himmelbjerget. We are young and happy, and so obviously in love even the photographer must have been envious.” The pronouns have slipped.

The other characters are just as intriguing, not least the vulgar landlady Mrs Thomsen: “There was a purity to her ugliness that commanded a shuddering respect.” When lodging with Mrs Thomsen, Kurt slept in her deceased husband’s bed and wore his suits. Now, downstairs with Lise, he repeats the act with Vilhelm’s possessions. But no real relationship seems to form between him and Lise, and then our narrator notes his exit from the novel with panache: “He has served his purpose in this book and now falls out of its pages like a bouquet of dried violets, colourless and without scent.” It is as though Kurt was never real at all.

Are any of us real? Other unnamed characters in the book are “pretexts”, the narrator tells us, “entirely insignificant in and of themselves”. She goes even further: “You and I too are pretexts for fateful interactions between people we don’t know and will never meet.”

From this puzzle-like tale emerges a gruesome depiction of how madness throws a person’s orientation in the world into total disarray, and a playfully metatextual exercise on the mechanics of novel-writing. Vilhelm’s Room is a beguiling, often confounding novel from one of the 20th century’s most original writers.

Vilhelm’s Room by Tove Ditlevsen, and translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell, is published by Penguin Classics (£12.99). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £11.69. Delivery charges may apply

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Photography by Alamy