The Trouble with Happiness: and Other Stories (Penguin classics)

Celebrated Danish writer, Tove Ditlevsen was known for mining her own life to fuel her creative work, from her novels to her poetry, and these newly-translated stories are no exception. This edition brings together her pieces from The Umbrella first published in 1952 and The Trouble with Happiness from 1963. They’re difficult to read, not because the style’s particularly challenging, but because her outlook’s so unrelentingly, convincingly, bleak. There’s an overwhelming sense of desolation running right through these: all focused on scenes and episodes from domestic life, families, parents and children enmeshed in forms of everyday, emotional destruction. Ditlevsen’s fascination with the minutiae of people’s relationships, and women’s inner worlds, made her popular with female readers but led to her dismissal by many of the prominent male critics of her time, not surprising I suppose, since men are by far the most dangerous creatures represented here: fathers who fantasize about emotionally tormenting their children; men who delight in casual cruelty or who blithely abandon their wives, mistresses or children to poverty and deprivation.Ditlevsen’s ability to convey the full horrors of what it is to be isolated and disillusioned matches that of Jean Rhys’s, while her more abstract later stories, like The Method, resembled aspects of Anna Kavan’s troubled perspective. Ditlevsen’s prose’s remarkably disciplined, her style often understated, predominantly lucid, and her imagery’s sometimes marvellously vivid - even in the more sketch-like entries such as A Nice Boy one of a handful told from a child’s perspective, a beautifully-realised depiction of alienation and anxiety. Ditlevsen’s characters seem to fall into two camps the oppressed or the oppressive, people grappling with moments of realisation, confronted with their basest desires or slowly resigning themselves to the harsh realities of their suffocating existence. These are stories of petty tyranny, sudden betrayals, deceit, thwarted longings, and loss of love, all meticulously observed. Most are grounded in working-class Danish society or in middle-class families in crisis, reflecting Ditlevsen’s own background, although her occasional forays into exploring wealthier families show acute loneliness as present in all walks of life. There are entries that are a little slight, and others that overlap with each other too much and would’ve benefited from further editing, but these are essentially quibbles, overall, I thought this was an extremely impressive collection, although possibly best dipped into, than read straight through. Translated from the Danish by Michael Favala Goldman

An unsettling collection of Scandi-domestic-noir short stories, mainly featuring unhappy women and unfeeling men. Husbands and wives are strangers to each other, homes are minefields, children are screwed up, happiness is always beyond reach.The characters are often not named or described, and there’s little sense of time or place, and indeed little action - it’s mostly interiors and interiority. Despite this semblance of intimacy, the reader is kept at a distance by the sparse dispassionate style. Ditlevsen doesn’t try to elicit sympathy, and oddly enough the stories are more powerful for her matter-of-fact presentation. It’s like a film with no background music to indicate how you’re meant to feel - which can be a more raw and confronting experience than when you’re being played by a soundtrack.I’ll be honest, I didn’t enjoy this volume to start with. I found it too cold, stark, nihilistic. The stories are very short so it’s easy to race through them, but the unrelenting unhappiness left me feeling even more sad and hopeless than usual. Then I found that the secret was only to read a small number of stories at a time, and slowly. I started to appreciate the nuance and the author’s craft much more then, and was glad I did.Like Katherine Mansfield’s stories (which I love) they are mood pieces, glimpses of lives, snapshots - ie not much action or plot, just relationships and feelings. I say ‘just’ but relationships and feelings are the fabric of life after all, so why should a scene from, for instance, the life of a woman who tiptoes around her house for fear of waking her irritable / tyrannical husband who works nights be considered an insignificant subject? Once I’d adjusted to the micro narrative level and flat tone, I found these stories rich and poignant.And then the final story, ‘The trouble with happiness’ - wow. It’s entirely different from what’s gone before, so just when you’ve got used to the clinical descriptions of nameless sorrowful others, there’s a very personal first person narrative, a complete tonal shift charged with huge emotional power that took this reader completely by surprise. The same themes of alienation and loss, but also a young woman taking charge of her life, becoming independent, succeeding as a writer - a master-stroke. I immediately wanted to go back and read the preceding stories again, and changed my view of this collection altogether. A largely bleak but ultimately rewarding read.

The Trouble with Happiness: and Other Stories by Tove Ditlevsen Goodreads reviewI got The Trouble with Happiness: and Other Stories by Tove Ditlevsen, for free from NetGalley for a fair and honest review.The Trouble with Happiness: and Other Stories by as the title suggest is a collection of short stories by, Tove Ditlevsen, a celebrated Danish writer, who better known for her poetry.This collection of stories examines how sometimes when we get the things that gave us happiness, can also lead to the greatest disappointments.For example, the story of the girl who wants an umbrella to a child going to stay with her father for the weekend after a divorce.What I really liked about these stories although, they seem to have the same feel of fairy tales with the strong moral tones of the classic stories of another Danish storyteller Hans Christian Anderson.This may seem to be more of the case as they were originally published in the 1970’s giving them some sort of an historical quality that books which were contemporary at the time have gained due to how long ago they were published.All this makes The Trouble With Happiness by Tove Ditlevsen well worth reading for both its themes and its time in history.