VILHELM'S ROOM

A final novel by the noted Danish writer.

Vilhelm and Lise, a newspaper editor and well-published writer, respectively, are “two people who leave each other for good every day for twenty years,” endlessly dissatisfied with each other. Finally Vilhelm does leave, moving in with a lover, Mille, who “force-fed him like a goose, stuffed and basted him and buried all his exquisite, dark thoughts under mountains of liver paté.” Fifty-one-year-old Lise—who we know at the very beginning of the novel is dead, though not yet how—takes out a lonely hearts ad and, urged on by their mutual landlady (a nasty piece of work), a young man named Kurt replies, hoping to take advantage of Lise’s vulnerability. Kurt moves in, discovers a checkbook Vilhelm left behind, and goes to town, while Lise drifts deeper and deeper into a numbing melancholy. She has good reason: As Ditlevsen’s story unfolds, we learn that Vilhelm is quite the creep, fond of drunken binges and cutting remarks (as when he sneers, “Had I enriched world literature with my trivial prattling?”), criticizes Lise’s appearance, and eggs her on to “just get on with it”—the “it” being the suicide she has long contemplated (“One does not forfeit the right to die because one is a mother”). As followers of Ditlevsen’s life and work will know—she killed herself in 1976, shortly after the book’s publication—this is a roman à clef. None of the characters are particularly likable, with Lise scolding herself for passivity and Mille and Vilhelm plotting ways to dump each other, having long lost the spark that brought them together.

Memorable, if mostly for its elegantly despairing view of the human condition.