The Trouble with Happiness: And Other Stories

by Tove Ditlevsen, Michael Favala Goldman (Translator)

Overview

The Trouble with Happiness is a powerful new collection of short stories by Tove Ditlevsen, “a terrifying talent” (Parul Sehgal, The New York Times).

A newly married woman longs, irrationally, for a silk umbrella; a husband chases away his wife’s beloved cat; a betrayed mother impulsively sacks her housekeeper. Underneath the surface of these precisely observed tales of marriage and family life in midcentury Copenhagen pulse currents of desire, violence, and despair, as women and men struggle to escape from the roles assigned to them and dream of becoming free and happy—without ever truly understanding what that might mean.

Tove Ditlevsen is one of Denmark’s most famous and beloved writers, and her autobiographical Copenhagen Trilogy was hailed as a masterpiece on republication in English, named a New York Times Best Book of the Year, and lauded for its wry humor, limpid prose, and powerful honesty. The poignant and understated stories in The Trouble with Happiness, written in the 1950s and 1960s and never before translated into English, offer readers a new chance to encounter the quietly devastating work of this essential twentieth-century writer.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250863102
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	04/18/2023
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	4.90(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Tove Ditlevsen was born in 1917 in a working-class neighborhood in Copenhagen. Her first volume of poetry was published when she was in her early twenties and was followed by many more books, including the three volumes of the Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood (1967), Youth (1967), and Dependency (1971). She died in 1976.

Table of Contents

Book One: The Umbrella

The Umbrella

The Cat

My Wife Doesn’t Dance

His Mother

Queen of the Night

One Morning in a Residential Neighborhood

A Nice Boy

Life’s Persistence

Evening

Depression

Book Two: The Trouble with Happiness

The Knife

The Method

Anxiety

The Mother

A Fine Business

The Bird

The Little Shoes

The Best Joke

Two Women

Perpetuation

The Trouble with Happiness

Editorial Reviews

"Ditlevsen can conjure an entire world in just a few words.”

—Tabish Khair, The Times Literary Supplement

“[Ditlevsen’s] legacy endures with this collection of short stories . . . Beautifully crafted.”

—Angela Haupt, TIME

"Quiet and devastating . . . The stories are simple; the characters ordinary and immensely human. Their motivations are mysterious and subtle, and Ditlevsen is acutely sensitive to the way normal life can wear at their hearts . . . Already renowned for her memoirs, Ditlevsen is now poised to win acclaim as a master of short fiction."

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"A central work of modern Danish literature."

—Kirkus Reviews

“[A] literary titan . . . [Ditlevsen’s] terse, unnerving stories peer into the fragility of relationships and the casual epiphanies that gut her characters.”

—Oprah Daily (Most Anticipated Books of 2022)

"These spare and sparkling stories summon deep wells of emotion without the slightest trace of sentimentality.”

—Chloe Schama, VOGUE

“These collected short stories show off [Ditlevsen’s] astonishingly precise prose.”

—Ellen Peirson-Hagger,The New Statesman

From the Publisher

2022-01-12
A brooding collection of stories by the iconic Danish writer.

Ditlevsen, who died in 1976, was no stranger to misery: Addicted to drugs and alcohol, she was committed to psychiatric care several times. Many of the characters she depicts in this slender volume of stories could use professional care themselves. In the opening story, a young woman who “had never demonstrated a special talent of any kind” longs for just two things in life: a man and an umbrella. She attains the first, but the second is slower to arrive. “Sometimes she would lie awake next to Egon, or in her bed in the maid’s room in the house where she worked, nursing her peculiar dream of owning an umbrella,” writes Ditlevsen, and when the woman finally does pull the money together to buy an inexpensive bumbershoot, her enraged husband breaks it over his knee. There the story ends, and one can imagine the couple living miserably ever after. In another story, an aging woman despises any reminder that she will one day die yet introduces a prospective daughter-in-law to everyone in her family, the dead by way of photographs, knowing that one day she’ll be reduced to a few memories and a photo on her sewing table. A botched abortion here, an affair there, a child who, though only 7, “already possessed a great deal of formless anxiety,” a father considered nice only because he does not beat his children—these are the people and events that populate Ditlevsen’s unhappy world. About the only promise of redemption comes in the title story, in which a young woman who inhabits a dank corner of a tiny apartment with her parents, her father “completely superfluous in my mother’s world,” works herself through sheer will into a career as a writer. If this small, gloomy piece is a roman à clef, then Ditlevsen deserves every bit of the reader’s sympathy.

Neurasthenic and melancholic but a central work of modern Danish literature.

Kirkus Reviews