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, 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 mid-century 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 re-publication in English, 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:	9780374605612
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	04/19/2022
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Tove Ditlevsen (1917–1976) was born 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).

Michael Favala Goldman is a poet, a jazz clarinetist, and a widely published translator of Danish literature. More than one hundred of his translations have appeared in journals such as The Harvard Review and The Columbia Journal. Among his ten translated books are The Water Farm Trilogy, Farming Dreams, and Selected Poems of Benny Andersen. He lives in Florence, Massachusetts.

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

★ 01/17/2022

This quiet and devastating collection of vignettes from Ditlevsen (1917–1976) follows Goldman’s recent translation of the last entry in Ditlevsen’s memoir cycle The Copenhagen Trilogy. The stories mainly turn on domestic dramas, revealing all the simmering, explosive tensions found in marriage, family, and parenthood. In “The Little Shoes,” a middle-aged mother is consumed by envy for her housekeeper’s youth. In “A Fine Business,” a woman is pained with sympathy for a single mother who, desperate for cash, accepts a cruelly low offer on her house. Often, characters imbue mundane, household objects with intense psychological meaning, as in “The Umbrella,” as a husband expresses his unreasonable contempt for his wife by breaking her umbrella. 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. Readers will recognize the themes of anger, disappointment, and frustration that recur within the author’s universe. Alongside this discomfort, though, is the opportunity for deep transformation. Already renowned for her memoirs, Ditlevsen is now poised to win acclaim as a master of short fiction. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

"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

10/01/2021

Danish author Ditlevsen died a suicide in 1976 after the tumultuous life she illuminated in The Copenhagen Trilogy, a tripartite memoir that has recently caught fire in the Anglophone world as an important work of literature; comparisons have been made to Elena Ferrante's "Neapolitan Quartet." Never before translated into English, this story collection often embodies quiet but awful meanness: a husband chases away his wife's beloved cat, and a woman angry with her own circumstances dumps a beloved housekeeper. With a 35,000-copy first printing.

Library Journal

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