At the beginning of the year, I started my 24 in ’24 project which I described in Episode 41 of Adventures With My Forties. Here is the list of the projects I hoped to tackled in 2024, and in this week’s episode, I discuss what I actually accomplished. Spoiler alert: I didn’t cross many items off my list because the magic of my Read Around the World quest and Brazil intervened (but I’m not complaining!)

I shall return to these show notes after the Chaos of the Holidays and update with a proper transcript but I just wanted to leave this here so at least you have the links to my original list. Okay! I must go finish the last few chores that stand between me and Christmas in Nebraska!

For Denmark, I read The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood—Youth—Dependency by Tove Ditlevsen, translated from the Danish by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman, and wow wow WOW. (Just imagine I wrote “wow” about four billion times.) What an extraordinary memoir.

The Copenhagen Trilogy brings together three memoirs that were published as separate books. Childhood describes Tove’s childhood in a working class neighborhood in Copenhagen with a dad who is frequently unemployed and a mother who is narcissistic, manipulative, and cruel. Youth describes the time after her confirmation, when she goes to work at the age of 14, and starts dating and having sex. Dependency begins with her first marriage (loveless, sexless) spans her second and third marriages, during which she becomes addicted to prescription medication, and ends with her fourth marriage. 

Tove Ditlevsen wrote a stark, matter-of-fact confessional memoir that says the things we usually do not care to admit to ourselves. I just opened my copy at random and noticed this quote:

It bothers me a lot that I don’t seem to own any real feelings anymore, but always have to pretend that I do by copying other people’s reactions. It’s as if I’m only moved by things that come to me indirectly. I can cry when I see a picture in the newspaper of an unfortunate family that’s been evicted, but when I see the same ordinary sight in reality, it doesn’t touch me.

The Copenhagen Trilogy, p. 94.

The memoir does not shy away from uncomfortable subjects, including two illegal abortions, addiction to pain medications, and unfulfilling sex. She describes these matters so bluntly, almost with a medical precision, that reading this memoir at times felt like the literary equivalent of jumping into Arctic waters. Your soul shudders from the shock. Yet her writing style is so compelling, I was happy to dive deeper and deeper into those frigid waters, paddling around the the raw, intimate details of Ditlevesen’s unhappiness.

This is not the sort of survivor memoir that inflates your heart and leaves you believing anything is possible. It will instead shred your soul and live it in ribbons– ribbons which are poetically arranged, but ribbons nevertheless. And yet… there was something about this memoir, with all its anguish and aching loneliness, that left me craving more. It felt perhaps like an antidote to the all-too-pervasive social media that presents perfect glimpses into influencers curated lives.

There is a lot more Tove Ditlevsen in my future. Especially whenever my soul yearns a good cathartic shredding.

For Czechia, I read R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), the play that introduced the world to the word “robot.” The play was written in 1920 by Karel Čapek. I read an edition translated by Paul Server and Nigel Playfair that was first published in 2001.

When I read the elevator pitch for this book — a sci-fi play that introduced the word “robot” — I knew I had found my pick for Czechia. I have a long love for sci-fi, especially robot stories, that started when my dad introduced me to Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series when I was in high school. Fun fact: the author did not actually coin the word “robot.” His brother Josef suggested the term, deriving it from a Czech dialect word for “drudgery.”

Being a play from the 1920’s, R.U.R. has the dialogue and vibe of a musical from the 1940s, minus the singing and dancing (though a chorus line of scientists dancing the can-can would have fit in nicely with the play’s second act.) I absolutely adored R.U.R. and its commentary on the issues surrounding artificial intelligence. Despite being over a century old, the play is still relevant and I recommend it to anyone with even a passing interest in sci-fi.

As of the time of this post, R.U.R. is in pre-production for a new Hollywood adaptation which I will definitely be seeing.

Coming soon: A transcript for this episode!

But, in the interest of avoiding a “burnout relapse,” I’m not creating the transcript today. Or tomorrow. Honestly, the proper show notes will probably not arrive until after the 2024 holiday season.

Which reminds me: Happy Holidays!