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David Ebershoff

The Danish Girl

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Though the title character of David Ebershoff's debut novel is a transsexual, The Danish Girl is less explicitly concerned with transgender issues than the mysterious and ineffable nature of love and transformation in relationships.
Loosely based on the life of Danish painter Einar Wegener who, in 1931, became the first man to undergo a sex-change operation, The Danish Girl borrows the bare bones of his story as a starting point for an exploration of how Wegener's decisions affected the people around him. Chief among these is his Californian wife, Greta, also a painter, who unwittingly sets her husband's feet on the path to transformation when, trying to finish a portrait, she asks Einar to stand in for her female sitter. Putting on her clothes and shoes, he is shaken:
Einar could concentrate only on the silk dressing his skin, as if it were a bandage. Yes, that was how it felt the first time: the silk was so fine and airy that it felt like a gauze-a balm-soaked gauze lying delicately on healing skin. Even the embarrassment of standing before his wife began to no longer matter, for she was busy painting with a foreign intensity in her face. Einar was beginning to enter a shadowy world of dreams where Anna's dress could belong to anyone, even to him.
Greta encourages her husband not only to dress like a woman, but to take on a woman's persona, as well. What starts out as a harmless game soon evolves into something deeper, and potentially threatening to their marriage. Yet Greta's love proves to be enduring if not immutable.
Ebershoff's historical prestidigitation is remarkable, making it seem easy to create the sights and sounds and smells of 1930s Denmark. Even more remarkable is his treatment of Greta: he gets inside her head and heart, and renders her in such loving detail that her reactions make perfect sense. Ebershoff's sensitivity to Greta is one of the finest achievements of this startling first novel; Einar is more of a cipher. In the end, this is Greta's book and David Ebershoff has done her proud. -Sheila Bright
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  • sekarlangitifyshared an impression8 years ago
    👍Worth reading

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    Quotes

    • Elena Kostyshinahas quoted4 years ago
      ithdrew their pencils from their breast pockets. Greta’s heart began to beat against her ribs as she
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      • sekarlangitifyhas quoted8 years ago
        In early 1931 when the news broke that a man had changed his gender, newspapers around the world ran accounts of Einar Wegener’s remarkable life. (It is interesting to note that Lili Elbe herself leaked the story to the press, and wrote some stories about herself, including her own obituary, under a pseudonym.) Many of those articles were helpful in writing this novel, especially those in Politiken and other Danish newspapers. Another indispensable source was Lili Elbe’s diaries and correspondence, which Niels Hoyer edited and published as Man Into Woman. Those journal entries and letters provided critical factual details of Einar’s evolution, especially regarding Lili’s first visit to Wegener’s studio, Einar’s mysterious bleeding and physical decline, and his journey to and stay at the Dresden Municipal Women’s Clinic. The passages in my book that deal with these incidents are especially indebted to Hoyer’s assemblage of Lili Elbe’s original words. Nonetheless, I have changed so many elements of Einar Wegener’s story that the characters in these pages are entirely fictional. The reader should not look to this novel for very many biographical details of Einar Wegener’s life, and no other character in the novel has any relation to an actual person, living or dead.
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        • sekarlangitifyhas quoted8 years ago
          “Am I really a woman now?”
          Part of Greta was numbing over with shock. Her husband was no longer alive. It
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