It took me a long time to read these stories, mainly because I found them to be unremittingly bleak. They are all set around the home, and frankly make family life seem horrific. The husbands or fathers bully, abandon, or at best simply don't understand their wives and children. The wives for the most part simply accept this as their lot in life. I failed to connect with anyone in these stories. The writing is good, perhaps I simply read this at the wrong time.

*Many thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for a review copy in exchange for an honest opinion.*

I read this nearly immediately after finishing The Copenhagen Trilogy by Ditlevsen, and wow - I’m glad I read them in that order! These short stories are so intertwined with Ditlevsen’s own experiences, and this in itself is fascinating to link each story to situations from her life. I highly recommend!

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 bleak but ultimately rewarding read.

This review is based on an E-ARC from Penguin UK and NetGalley.

Even though I have the Copenhagen trilogy standing on my shelf, this is my first meeting with Tove Dietlevsen’s writing. And what a meeting it was!

“The trouble with happiness” is a collection of short stories that all tackle seemingly ordinary topics and conflicts, but a lot is lurking under the surface.

Dietlevsen combines ice cold Scandinavian minimalism with heavy symbolism.
A cat isn’t just a cat and an umbrella isn’t just an umbrella, they are rather used as means of control.

And the traditional female roles that women have historically been forced into is largely at the center of this collection.
Given the time period that these stories was written in, this is quite a powerful way to stand up to the patriarchy.

All in all this is a sharp collection of stories about desperation, anger and the seemingly impossible search for happiness.
I will be fast tracking her Copenhagen trilogy after this😀

The Trouble with Happiness brings together two short story collections from 1952 and 1963, translated into English for the first time. The title gives the game away - do not expect much pleasure, joy or happy endings. The stories depict failed or failing relationships, dysfunctional families and frequently human weakness. Of Hanne in the story, The Little Shoes, it is said "It was as if a zone of loneliness had appeared around her" and this could be said of many of the stories protagonists. However, the stories are more truthful than depressing and precisely written. The later collection is more accomplished than the first but there is real consistency here and stories like The Knife and The Bird are unsettling and strangely moving. Recommended.

I think it's hard to separate the literary work from its' time, and with "The Trouble With Happiness" by Tove Ditlevsen the readers are transformed to the 1950s and 1960s, when this collection of short stories was created.

The stories about love, loss, disappointment, familial and marital relations feel melancholic, as well as a little eery at times, when the author explores the subjects of violence and intentional cruelty. Tove Ditlevsen is a very atmospheric writer and can encompass a lot in just a few pages.

However, as short stories collections go, there are pieces that are more engaging than others, making "The Trouble With Happiness" quite uneven. There are stories that feel masterful, and others are just passable.

I guess an awareness of the social context and the reality in which "The Trouble With Happiness" is immersed - mid-century Denmark (Copenhagen, to be precise), could massively improve the reader's experience and help appreciate Ditlevsen work and talent more, but I think it's a bit too much to ask.

The Trouble with Happiness: and Other Stories by Tove Ditlevsen Goodreads review


I 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.

I really wanted to like these short stories (recently translated from Danish for rerelease into the world decades after they were written) and their sparse melancholy but I just found them all much too similar. Nothing really happens except emotion, and while that can be interesting in a little character study of a story, that was the basis of every story in the collection. Not bad in any way, just not my sort of thing. This was made worse by the fact that the ARC was formatted quite poorly meaning that, because the stories were so narratively similar, it was really hard to tell where one ended and the best began.

This is a beautiful yet terrifying collection of short stories about relationships and families. Don’t let that put you off. It is bleak but brilliant and written in a sparing style which makes it all the more haunting. It’s not heartwarming , it’s desperately sad. But go and read it and I will go and read everything else Tove Ditlevsen wrote.
Many thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC. All views are my own.

Unfortunately this proof copy was extremely difficult to read. The formatting was terrible and any words containing the letters “fi” or “ff” were left without those letters, making for puzzling reading a lot of the time. There was also no indication as to when one story ended, and the next one began, which is very off putting in a short story collection. For these reasons, I had to abandon the book three stories in as it was too confusing and frustrating to continue.

Let me start by saying I love the title of the book and I know how the melancholic, sad stories might deter some. These are not uplifting and heart warming stories and they might even feel heart breaking but they feel so genuine and the writing is so beautiful and hope many would consider reading it.

TOVE DITLEVSEN – THE TROUBLE WITH HAPPINESS **

I read this novel in advance of publication through NetGalley in return for an honest review.

Being a lover of short stories, this is a book for which I had high hopes. Turns out it was written back in the 50’s and 60’s and has just been translated. Quite why, I’m not sure. For me it was one of the most dull and uninteresting books I have read in a long while.

I am sure that many people will love it: it is just not for me. And of all the dozens of books I have reviewed so far, I’ve never had to say that. It’s not badly written, as in an amateurish way, which is why I gave it two stars, but I found the dense style turgid – a lump of prose that conveyed no emotions and was full of mundane detail. I don’t see the point in saying any more. Life is too short.

Unfortunately this book wasn't for me. That's not to say its not a great book, it may well be to readers who have read books by this author already but I just didn't connect with it I'm afraid. It is very different to what I normally read and as another person mentioned, there were a lot of errors in the text and layout which I understand comes with reading an advanced copy but it was a little off putting at how much there was, sometimes I was unable to make out what a word should be. I hate to leave negative reviews and this isn't necessarily negative, just me saying it's not for me, sorry.

3.5 stars rounded up.

I really enjoyed the first few stories in this collection. The Umbrella was my favourite of all of them, but I also really enjoyed The Cat, My Wife Doesn't Dance and His Mother. The writing is assured and focuses on the small moments of life where things become clear, when secrets are revealed, or when character's innermost feelings become known to them - turning points that are miniscule, not a result of earth-shattering events.

However, there was an overall depressing tone to many of the stories - there were a few where the core metaphors didn't quite work for me. The second half wasn't as enjoyable to read for me, and of the stories of the second half I only really liked The Knife, The Mother and the final and titular story The Trouble With Happiness.

Still, for lovers of astutely observed characters and stories that pay close attention to the inner lives of often overlooked characters these stories are certainly worth a read.

I would be keen to read more from this author.

My thanks to netgalley and the publisher for a copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

After reading and enjoying the authors three part autobiography, I was interested in picking up her short story collection. The strength of her work lies in her voice and subject matter. Primarily she was a poet who published 10 Poetry collections and this is clearly visible in her work. She displays a poet's ear, uses concise and precise prose displaying a sense of humour and vulnerability. The stories are realistic and beautiful with no happy endings, revealing the masks we wear to cover up our immaturity. The theme of individuals not really connecting is prevalent throughout the stories whether parent and child, employee and employer or husband and wife. She skilfully illustrates the impossible situation of individuals wanting or expecting other to meet them in their reality and being surprised or resentful when that doesn't happen. As in her 3 part memoir Childhood, Youth, Dependency, she delivers a message of compassion and solidarity. We deserve to be kinder to ourselves and to each other.

A stunning collection of some of the bleakest short stories about the human condition I have read in a long time. Ditlevesen turns an eagle eye on domestic relationships, looking at the rift between thought and feeling and social interaction and mining a rich seam of human misery and disconnect where there should be connection. This was not an easy read, because her acute perception is not merciful at all. Nobody, except the children she writes about get any real pity here and the fact that the children are exempt makes these essays all the more cutting. There is a lot of unhappiness in this book and it is brilliant and terrible.

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.

These modernist short stories have a melancholic air, shifting between domestic settings and a more figurative level where an umbrella, for example, becomes a stand-in for longed for desires. I didn't always find it easy to enter the stories: something about the style or possibly the translation left me feeling like an observer rather than being on the inside of the tales - but that's personal preference.

Moments of sudden clarity. Gradual realizations. Unexpected awareness of things previously ignored. Life changes in all of these ways. In this fine collection of short stories, Tove Ditlevsen shows us how and breaks readers’ hearts in the process.

The stories have domestic settings and it is in the home that we see marriages shift and fail, children trying to deal with the confusion of changing family structures, and women coming to new understandings of themselves and their lives. These changes do not come about because of cataclysmic events, but rather through small things that, from the outside, may not seem like life-changing moments. But it is exactly these usually unnoticed events and interactions that alter the lives of the characters in profound ways.

The writing is magnificent, such as when one character states, ‘Loving someone couldn’t be helped. It came and went like whooping cough.’ (p79) I was drawn into each story and felt like I was in the room with the characters. I have not read any of this author’s other work, but I will not hesitate to do so in future. I am a big fan of short stories and I know from experience that in most collections there will be one or two stories that I am not so keen on. That was not the case here. There were no stories that I did not like. I highly recommend this book.

I was quite pleased to receive an ARC of this book from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and balanced review.

I have not read much Tove Ditlevsen, I have read the usual stuff: Youth, Childhood, Dependency and The Faces. But, I have yet to read any short stories by her. Her writing is most often incredibly descriptive, containing some really psychological intensities about the character's appearance as a critique of who they are. This isn't just through looks, it is also through perception, what is thought about their looks and by who. This is definitely true for the first part of this book entitled: The Umbrella. This book in which Helga is constantly being critiqued by everything and everyone around her shows this emotional isolation she is in far better than simply writing about her feelings. I absolutely adore this passage:
When she was half-asleep, a strange desire came drifting into her consciousness: If only I had an umbrella, she thought. It occurred to her suddenly that this item, which for certain people was just a natural necessity, was something she had dreamed of her whole life.
In the story His Mother, there is this very same sense of 'being sensible' for the sake of perception. The line 'it's not really accurate to call her a 'lady' although she would certainly find the title appropriate...' is yet again, the same idea that other people judge the perception of the character before the author or reader do. The character already exists, we are simply perceiving them as are other characters. Most of the time, these perceptions are highly judgemental.
In the story Life's Persistence as well, we get this heightened anxiety around judgement. The story itself starts with a judgement of characters:
The waiting room was filled with women who avoided looking at one another. They looked down at the dusty floor, at the tips of their shoes, at the dirty wall of undefinable colour... They were all so discreet and dressed so self-effacingly, they could slip in anywhere without anyone noticing them.
Almost all the time, Ditlevsen starts her stories with this shaking anxiety over a character and how they are perceived by the world. It's like people are looking at them perform as a person and not actually be a person, reducing the person down to the bare essentials of emotions. This is something that the author does so well that you don't even realise that you too, are being influenced by the lexis of the author around the subject of how everyone else in the world of the narrative views the character. An intense climb of perception and realisation happens between author and reader when we are told to face ourselves, face our own prejudices about others and explore the idea that you don't really know anyone's story at all.
I love the fact that most of these characters, especially Hanne from Evening, are trapped in their own heads because Ditlevsen goes through esactly what is happening in there. At each moment, there is a thought or a feeling with some sort of intensity that not only influences the decisions that the character makes, but also influences the next thought they have and the way their character changes through the story. Thought and action are side by side in Ditlevsen's unnerving sense of anxieties and depressions that litter her characters' minds. It is a brilliant way of writing that makes for really interesting character development and atmosphere. I especially love the line from Evening:
...so Hanne herself became nearly immobile, feeling her father's expression wrap a dark cloak of anxiety around both of them. Then her mother said without looking at her, 'How about going back up and playing with your little brother? Your daddy's tired.' But that wasn't true at all...
Through stories such as Depression and Lulu's mundane lifestyle, all the way to Anxiety where a woman dreams of having a cat in the depth of the eerie quiet, Tove Ditlevsen manages to create characters that are not only memorable, but absolutely brilliant.
They all lose control in their own heads.