The faces

After the enormous success of late Danish author Ditlevsen's Copenhagen Trilogy (2021), her U.S. publisher will release two more of her books in 2022, this book and The Trouble with Happiness (look for a review in a future issue of Booklist). Like the trilogy, The Faces, written in 1968, reveals a thinly disguised version of the author herself. Unflinching and tightly compressed, the novella follows narrator Lise Mundus, a 40-year-old children's-book author with writer's block and a complicated domestic life, as she goes through a precipitous mental breakdown, overdoses on drugs, and is institutionalized. Ditlevsen depicts Lise's startling, vivid inner world--full of what outsiders might label auditory and visual hallucinations--with such precise, poetic language that it is impossible not to empathize with her experience. Obsessed with the increasing fear that her husband, housekeeper, daughter, doctor, and pretty much everyone else she knows are intent on destroying her, she observes with horror the mocking faces of those around her, some of which seem to have been "bought second-hand," while others fit their wearers "as poorly as their dresses did." Laced with flashes of shocking beauty, this is a precise depiction of a state of mind few would want to endure.