Danish author Tove Ditlevsen became known to the wider world a couple of years ago when her stunning memoirs, The Copenhagen Trilogy, were released. With the dexterity of an alchemist turning minerals into gold, Ditlevsen mined her real life for raw material which she transformed into polished, haunting works of art. Those elements are very much on display in The Faces too, written around the same time as the memoirs.

Reality disappeared behind her like someone on a railway platform as the train pulls away.

The Faces is about a woman’s journey through mental illness and recovery, unique for its striking language and poetry in prose – all hallmarks of Ditlevsen’s writing.

Our protagonist Lise is a famous author of children’s books, although she hasn’t penned anything in the last two years. While professionally, a writer’s block has hampered her creative output, in her personal life too, Lise is on the edge. To her ex-husband Asger, “a wife who wrote something as ridiculous as children’s books was suddenly a liability.” Her current husband, Gert, has been consistently unfaithful to her, not exactly the ideal husband material. Their housekeeper, Gitte, is a toxic influence on the family – she is sleeping with Gert as well as Lise’s elder son Moyen.

Lise is shown to be persistently tired, preferring the comfort of her bed and her pills. Then one night, in the novel’s first chapter, Gert confesses to her that his previous lover, Grete, has committed suicide. It profoundly unsettles Gert and Lise now feels stained by this incident too. One day, while having her bath, Lise overhears a heated conversation between Gert and Gitte through the bathroom pipes. Convinced, that they are plotting against her to induce her to take her own life like Grete did, Lise confronts them. Their vehement denial leaves Lise feeling dazed and confused. Yet her sense of unease is not quelled.

Finding her home environment increasingly unbearable and claustrophobic, Lise yearns to get away from it all. This desire compels her to overdose, not because she wants to die, but because she sees it as an opportunity to be transported somewhere else – a hospital.

Lise’s stay in the psychiatric hospital, then, forms a substantial chunk of the novel. It’s only in the hospital that the full extent of Lise’s illness becomes clear to the reader. Sadly, Lise may have escaped Gert and Gitte, but their voices continue to torment her. These taunting voices, playing on the frayed edges of her mind, are vividly real to her even when the reality is completely different. They assail her from all nooks and crannies, from the pipes to the non-existent speaking devices by her pillow. It’s not only the voices though, as she is increasingly haunted by disembodied faces too. Not only does Lise hear Gert and Gitte, she also sees them all over the hospital. To Lise, the faces of various staff members morph into the faces of these two, hounding her endlessly.

Lise is treading on eggshells as she tries to convince the doctors she is fine, while appearing surprised and disoriented on learning that they can’t experience the visions and hear the voices as she does. To complicate matters, Lise is wracked by guilt of being selfish and self-absorbed in her woes, for not being alive to the suffering of the wider world – a guilt that Gitte’s voice rubs like salt on her wound causing her much anguish.

As the title of the novel suggests, faces feature predominantly in the novel and the masks we allegedly don to keep up appearances forms one central theme.

They slept, and their faces were blank and peaceful and didn’t have to be used again until morning. Maybe they had even taken off their faces and placed them prudently on top of their clothes, to give them a rest. In the daytime the faces were constantly changing, as if she saw them reflected in flowing water.

Ditlevsen essentially offers a glimpse into the lived experience of mental illness, the inability to separate reality from illusion. By sleight of hand, she recreates the experience of madness from the inside, letting us explore the shifting contours of Lise’s mind and her unreliable perception of the world around her.

Brief, intense and awash with sublime imagery, Ditlevsen’s writing is beautiful and clear as always, and the plethora of metaphors and similes dotting her prose are breathtaking. For instance, the voices which came back to her “could be unraveled from each other like the strands of a tangled ball of yarn.” A random childhood day was “preserved in her mind like a thousand-year old insect encased in a lump of amber.” When looking in the mirror, “three delicate wrinkles lay like a pearl necklace around her neck”, while the morning light “had a yellow, withered cast to it, like fading snapshots left in a drawer that no one opens anymore.”

As Lise limps towards a tentative recovery underlined by her fear, the reader is aware of the path being anything but smooth given the complexity of her feelings. For we can’t help but wonder despite everything – Would Lise prefer the comfort and solace in madness far more than the bitter ugliness of reality?