The Danish Girl (Paperback)

by David Ebershoff (Author) "His wife knew first..." (more)
Key Phrases: lacquer trunk, lucerne grass, Professor Bolk, Frau Krebs, Widow House (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Though the title character of David Ebershoff's debut novel is a transsexual, the book is less concerned with transgender issues than the mysterious and ineffable nature of love. 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 jumping-off 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. While trying to finish a portrait of an opera singer who has cancelled a sitting, she asks Einar to stand in for her subject, putting on her dress, stockings, and shoes. The moment silk touches his skin, 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 soon recognizes her husband's affinity for feminine attire, and encourages him not only to dress like a woman, but to take on a woman's persona, as well. "Why don't we call you Lili?" she suggests. 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. As Einar inexorably transforms, he steps beyond "that small dark space between two people where a marriage exists" and Greta lets him go.

Ebershoff does a remarkable job of historical prestidigitation, creating the sights and sounds and smells of 1930s Denmark and making it seem easy. 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. Einar is more of a cipher, and ultimately less interesting than his wife. But in the end, this is Greta's book and David Ebershoff has done her proud. The Danish Girl marks a promising fictional debut. --Sheila Bright --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly
Ebershoff, the publishing director at Modern Library, has taken a highly unusual subject--and a big chance--for his first novel. That it comes off triumphantly is a tribute to his taste and restraint and to the highly empathetic quality of his imagination. His book is based on the real-life story of Einar Wegener, a Danish artist who 70 years ago became the first man to be medically transformed into a woman--long before the much better-known case of Christine Jorgensen. Ebershoff has naturally changed some of the characters, giving Einar an American wife from his own native city of Pasadena, thereby introducing a New World perspective on the drama. For a very real drama it is. Einar struggles with his inclinations to become the woman he and his wife, Greta, refer to as Lili, seemingly more agonized about what the change would mean than Greta, who is deeply loving and amazingly supportive throughout Einar's long ordeal. Seldom has the delicate question of sexual identity been more subtly probed (one would have to go all the way back to Jan Morris's autobiographical Conundrum); and Ebershoff's remarkable feel for the period atmosphere and detail of 1920s Copenhagen and early-'30s Dresden, where Lili's life-transforming operation is finally performed, has been poetically and intensely rendered. The portraits of the various medical men who offer their very different solutions to the problem are brilliantly accomplished. The original story ended much more unhappily than Ebershoff's, but his poignant and visionary conclusion is a fitting one for what is, above all, and despite its sensationalist trimmings, a profound and beautifully realized love story. Eight-city author tour; rights sold in Germany, Italy, U.K., Spain, Australia, Brazil, Finland, Portugal, the Netherlands and Denmark. (Feb.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics); Reprint edition (February 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140298487
• ISBN-13: 978-0140298482
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #21,586 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

34 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Do yourself a favor: Read this book!, February 17, 2000

By	PR (NYC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Danish Girl (Hardcover)

Okay, I'll admit it: I picked up this novel because of its subject matter. I was interested to learn about the first person to undergo gender-reassignment surgery (1931! ), but more so, I was curious to see how the author would handle this amazing story. I was--simply put--blown away. The Danish Girl is not a novelization of an amazing historical anecdote--it is a beautifully written, senstively-handled, and deeply-engaging novel that it absolutely one of the best I have read in recent years. Here is a book that truly makes the reader stop and question one of our most rigidly held fundaments of identity, gender. And the book does so by convincingly rendering its characters of Greta and Einar and Lili. What a romantic and moving book! Not only in its landscapes--Denmark's bogs, fog-dimmed streets in 1930s Paris, a river bank in pre-WWII Dresden all beautifully captured with an eye as painterly as Einar's--but in its moving story of the love between Greta and Einar and, noteably, Greta and Lili. I thought the book a poignant and sophisticated portrait of a marriage, with all its complexity and complications, that changes as Greta and her husband both do. The Danish Girl I would recommend--and am recommending--to all readers I know.

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A surprising but intensely romantic view of marriage & love., February 14, 2000

By	"dlevinso" (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Danish Girl (Hardcover)

The Danish Girl is compulsively readable - primarily because the three characters Einar/Lili and Greta are so finely and fully realized. That a story which on the surface should be so unlikely - i.e., that a woman would help her husband find the "girl within" - becomes so inevitable on the page is, I believe, the author's greatest achievement. It's wonderful that Greta (the wife) herself does not fully understand why she's helping Einar/Lili but that her motivations - conscious and subconscious - are revealed slowly throughout the course of the book both to herself and to the reader. It's also fascinating how different Greta and Einar's relationship is from Greta and Lili's, yet how complex and real and loving these relationships are. I only wish that the book hadn't ended with us knowing so little about what happened between Greta and Lili after they've moved forward in their lives. Nonetheless, this is an incredibly promising literary debut and I look forward to reading more by this author.

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A literary page-turner. Highly recommended., February 7, 2000

By	JM (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Danish Girl (Hardcover)

Brilliant -- THE DANISH GIRL is just what the book doctor ordered! The utterly absorbing plot is finely crafted and the questions that Ebershoff asks about love will stay with you long after you've read the last gorgeous page (truly -- I cannot recall a more beautiful and affecting last page). Perhaps most interesting to me is the character of Greta, a woman who is brave, curious, intrepid, creative, ambitious, a bit pushy, and ultimately not afraid to follow where love, the bonds of marriage, and commitment to the creative process might lead her. But that's not to say that Einar is any less compelling! Or that the lushly detailed settings of Copenhagen, Paris, California, and the Bluetooth Bog don't deserve as much praise. I feel as if I've been on the most fantastic voyage. This author should write for TRAVEL & LEISURE, his descriptions are that lucid and riveting. If I had a bookclub, I'd love for us to choose THE DANISH GIRL as our next selection -- there is so much to talk about! I highly recommend reading this novel.