Before starting to read these two collections of short stories, first published in 1952 and 1963, I rather wish I hadn’t researched the life of Tove Ditlevsen and had come to them ‘blind’. The title story, The Trouble with Happiness, is narrated in the first person and reads like a memoir but reading the others told in the third person I had Tove’s face in my mind’s eye too. Not that that is really a criticism. For the most part, they are sad, sad, emotionally engaging snapshots of women’s relationships (and children’s whole worlds) breaking down or about to break down. The characters pinpoint the exact moment they realise it is over for them and there is such poignancy in that.

‘She shouldn’t have gone. By constantly staying home, she warded off something terrible that was always just about to happen, something she was expecting, something that she, every day, minute by minute, pushed back into place like a wall that would topple if you didn’t press against it with all your might.’

‘His eyes took on a sudden snake-like expression, as if he were evaluating how much he had wounded her. He hates me, she thought, dumbfounded.’

From ‘Perpetuation’, a story of family break-up that I found especially moving:

‘What had he felt? It was strange she didn’t ask. The fact that we are so incredibly uninterested in what is happening inside the person closest to us is probably the source of many problems.’

‘Why doesn’t it dawn on a person that their parents had their own lives separate from their children, until it’s too late to ask them how it was? And without knowing that, the whole thing is hidden, the most important thing in the world eternally inaccessible.’

‘…maybe it is always too late by the time the heart is ready for reconcilation.’

Not uplifting reading by any means, but heartbreaking moments exquisitely portrayed, the sheer quality of the writing here encourages me to seek out the author’s other work - memoirs, novels, poetry. Recommended.

With thanks to Penguin Classics via NetGalley for the opportunity to read an ARC.

The Trouble With Happiness - Tove Ditlevsen

The advance free copy sent to me by Netgalley had so many spelling and grammatical errors, that I found it unreadable, and stopped around 50% of the way through the anthology.

That said, and accepting translation, this was definitely not for me, and certainly not what I was hoping for. Sorry.

This anthology of short stories is aptly named since most are about people’s attempts, and failures, to find some kind of happiness. Instead, there’s a lot of melancholy and a kind of hollowness and impermanence in any current sense of love or contentment.

Even when there’s a struggle to make things better, tiny events simply make them worse. The woman whose fancy has been to own a pretty umbrella which her husband breaks, the son who loses what his father perceives to be a precious knife, and the helpful adopted son who overhears gossip about him all feel the magnitude and the repercussions of small events.

And, there are victims. Many are women married to rather featureless, unemotional and sometimes unkind men but there are also the children of divorce and separation and people who never quite fit in through some physical imperfection or accident of birth.

The description is slow and exquisite, like the atmosphere in the house where the parents are in the throes of splitting up and unaware of their children, or the old man dying in hospital visited by relatives and friends. The stories are unhurried and exploratory.

The writing and translation combine to bring out the depths of these sad contexts and although the stories were first published in Denmark in the 1950s and 1960s they still resonate today. There is not much sense of hope in the writing but rather more an acceptance that that is how things are and, possibly, a lesson that the pursuit of true happiness is always chimerical.

That might make this a difficult collection for some readers but it might also be argued that this is a more realistic description of many people’s sad lives – and it is these which are particularly well evoked by this writer.