Tove Ditlevsen’s last novel, Vilhelm’s Room, was originally published in Denmark in 1975. As it begins, the protagonist, Lise Mundus, has just been abandoned by Vilhelm, her husband of 20 years. He’s a celebrity newspaper editor; she’s an acclaimed writer with a history of addiction. From a bed in a psychiatric ward, Lise publishes a lonely hearts ad: “Recently escaped a long, unhappy marriage – aged 51, but youthful in spirit – wonderful son, aged 15 – household literary name – summerhouse – large flat in the city centre – temporarily incapacitated by a nervous breakdown – prefers a motorist.”
The ad is seized upon by Lise’s malicious upstairs neighbour, Mrs Thomsen, who shows it to her young lodger/lover, Kurt, hoping he can financially exploit Lise. Kurt is duly installed in Lise’s home, but finds himself treated there with total indifference. Lise is wholly consumed with memories of Vilhelm and with plans to end her own life. We know she will carry these out; in the opening pages, she is already dead.
In the English-speaking world, Ditlevsen is best known for her great trilogy of memoirs, Childhood, Youth and Dependency. Her fiction is also often autobiographical to an unusual degree. Lise’s marriage isn’t just similar to Ditlevsen’s marriage to the editor Victor Andreasen – it’s identical. The lonely hearts ad is an edited form of one Ditlevsen really wrote. The book also deliberately elides the distinction between author and character. Sometimes Lise is a first-person narrator, but, from one word to the next, the “I” can become that of someone discussing a Lise who is already dead. In a typically jarring shift, we get: “Only one [photograph] have I kept: the photograph of Vilhelm and Lise at the top of Himmelbjerget. We are young and happy …”
The most crucial likeness between author and character is that Tove Ditlevsen would kill herself within a year of the novel’s publication. She used the same means as her alter ego, and, in her final letters to family, she expressed the same sentiments Lise feels in her last moments. What we are reading is an autofictional suicide note.
It is no surprise, then, that the book isn’t concerned with providing the usual pleasures of fiction. The plot is a series of arbitrary events that fail to matter to anyone. People have become ugly caricatures even to themselves. As an avatar of pain, Vilhelm is the one person who retains his full reality for Lise. His diary is full of sadistic ravings about her: “I want to see her suffer even more. Yet it’s impossible to bring her to her knees, because for her, suffering is so easily transformed into pleasure.” To her face, he rants: “When I met you, you were nothing but a blethering drug addict. You knew nothing of Rilke, Eliot, or Proust, and now all you do is plagiarise them.” Lise seems to revel in this cruelty, the only form of love she can still acknowledge. Her only other pleasure is anticipating death. As she heads off to take her life, she reflects that Vilhelm will be proud of her, and “is so overwhelmed with joy at what is finally within reach that she feels like singing and dancing all the way home …”
While the book is closely autobiographical, it never claims to be a truthful picture. The demand for accuracy is just another social dictate the already-dead need not respect. As we’re blithely told, “[Out] of sheer impatience to be rid of this Lise … in her final book, I basically make her out to be worse than she is.” And, since a memoir published in 2023 by Ditlevsen’s granddaughter, Lise Munk Thygesen, we’re aware of one crucial omission: the real Victor Andreasen sexually abused Ditlevsen’s teenage daughter, Helle, starting when the girl was 15. Ditlevsen knew, but never addressed it in her writing. Knowing this radically alters how we read Lise’s agonised loathing of Vilhelm and herself. What seemed to be fearless self-revelation is actually an exercise in not mentioning the single most important fact.
It will be obvious from the above that this book isn’t for everyone. Some will reject a book that endorses suicide; some will condemn Ditlevsen for concealing her husband’s crimes. Reading it can be like listening to a stranger ranting disconnectedly about her ex and viciously slagging off everyone she knows, while clearly desperately needing help that isn’t going to come. But Ditlevsen makes this darkest of all material fascinating, perversely likable and occasionally revelatory. She’s a brilliant writer and formidable thinker, even with her thinking at its most disordered. Vilhelm’s Room can be uneven and heavy-handed, and it’s nothing if not problematic. But it remains a unique and powerful document of catastrophic mental illness.
• In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
• Vilhelm’s Room by Tove Ditlevsen, translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell, is published by Penguin Classics, (£12.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
