Janique Vigier at Bookforum:
THE PERSONAL AD is a tried-and-true deus ex machina for novelists who write about desperate figures. In Ditlevsen’s final novel, Vilhelm’s Room (1975), written in the last year of her life, it’s more of a McGuffin. More than any of her previous fiction, the novel steers very close to the facts of the author’s life. (Fiction being the version of the story that is easier to look at.) Its narrator, Lise Mundus, is a famous poet married to a philandering newspaper editor. Vilhelm has recently left Lise for Mille, an old friend of Lise’s, after which Lise half-heartedly swallows some pills and is admitted to a psychiatric unit. (“The role of the patient satisfied so many of her infantile needs.”)
There she meets a fellow patient, Greta, and it’s Greta who writes the personal, on the premise that if a man leaves you, it’s your responsibility to find another. The ad appears in Vilhelm’s newspaper, where it’s seen by the widow who lives above Lise, who pushes her meek lodger, Kurt, to write a response.
more here.
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