Genres
Description
Copenhagen, 1968. Lise, a children's book writer and married mother of three, is becoming increasingly haunted by disembodied faces and taunting voices. Convinced that her housekeeper and husband are plotting against her, she descends into a terrifying world of sickness, pills and institutionalization. But is sanity in fact a kind of sickness? And might mental illness itself lead to enlightenment? Brief, intense and haunting, Ditlevsen's novel recreates the experience of madness from the inside, with all the vividness of lived experience.
Publication
Picador Paper (2022), 144 pages
User reviews
LibraryThing member JNSelko
An immensely powerful book.
LibraryThing member icolford
The Faces, Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen’s (1917-1976) intimate portrait of a woman’s descent into psychosis, was originally published in 1968 and made available in English translation in 1991. The story concerns Lise Mundus, a writer of children’s books who has three children and is married
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to her second husband, Gert. Gert has been carrying on an affair (a fact that does not seem to be a secret), and his mistress, Grete, has committed suicide. Lise has achieved modest success with her books and has recently received an award that has brought her a modicum of fame. But sudden fame, Lise reflects, “had brutally ripped away the veil that had always separated her from reality,” and she has lately been suffering from a “fear of being unmasked,” of being exposed as “someone she is not.” Deprived of her protective shield and propelled by escalating fear, Lise’s fragile grip on reality has slipped and she is descending into a delusional state. Nobody can be trusted. People’s faces have become masks, behind which they hide their true intentions toward her. She begins to doubt the veracity of what she is seeing with her own eyes and hearing with her own ears. More as a means of escape from persistent torment than an attempt to do away with herself, she ingests a bottle of sleeping pills and then phones her doctor to inform him of what she’s done. Ditlevsen’s vivid and painfully rendered narrative proceeds with Lise in hospital, admitted to a “secure unit” and placed in restraints. Her delusions continue. Disembodied voices reach her from the plumbing and the ventilation grates. In conversation with doctors, nurses and other inmates, she hears their voices speaking to her after their lips have stopped moving. Gradually, though, she realizes that these events are part of her illness and comes to understand what she must do if she is ever to find a place for herself in a world “where it might be possible to exist.” The power of this narrative derives from several sources: the blasé tone used to report startling and horrific incidents, the cool precision of the language, the rich use of metaphor (Lise’s mother: “She had stubbornly put on her youth; from behind it her age laughed between the false teeth like the troll in old fairy tales.”) Ditlevsen’s depiction of madness from within the afflicted mind is harrowing and genuinely unsettling. But The Faces is also a compassionate and moving novel that speaks truths worth heeding about mental illness. Show Less
Language
Original language
English
Original publication date
1968
Physical description
144 p.; 7.45 inches
ISBN
1250838193 / 9781250838193