The Danish Girl [Import] [Hardcover]

David Ebershoff (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Viking; 1ST edition (2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 029764579X
• ISBN-13: 978-0297645795
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.9 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (35 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,172,423 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

David Ebershoff is the author of four books of fiction, including The Danish Girl, The Rose City, and Pasadena. His most recent novel is the international bestseller, The 19th Wife. His writing has won a number of awards, including the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Lambda Literary Award. His books have been translated into eighteen languages to critical acclaim. Two of his novels are being adapted for film and television. Ebershoff teaches in the graduate writing program at Columbia University and is an editor-at-large at Random House. Originally from Pasadena, California, he now lives in New York City.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

44 of 45 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.

21 of 21 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" - 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.

22 of 24 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.