The Trouble with Happiness

October 1, 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.

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Starred review from January 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.

February 1, 2022
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 � clef, then Ditlevsen deserves every bit of the reader's sympathy. Neurasthenic and melancholic but a central work of modern Danish literature.

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February 15, 2022
Following the success of Ditlevsen's Copenhagen Trilogy, two of her other books, successful in Denmark but nearly unknown outside that country, will be translated and published in English for the first time: The Faces (2022) and this one, which compiles two brief books of short stories, 1952's The Umbrella and 1963's The Trouble with Happiness. The stories in each are compressed and potent, zeroing in on interactions within the members of small, unhappy nuclear families. Characters include a seven-year-old girl who "already possessed a great deal of formless anxiety" and a woman who wakes "early in the morning, feeling that her entire life was one big failure." While the repetition of themes can feel claustrophobic, Ditlevsen is a master at delineating subtle gradations of anguish and imbuing the most common of household objects, like the titular umbrella, with dread. Knitting these two volumes together reveals the author's progression from a relatively naturalistic writer to a more impressionistic one.

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