Some books need a chapter or two to warm up. The Trouble with Happiness and Other Stories had me by the third sentence.

“Helga had always – unreasonably – expected more from life than it could deliver. People like her live among us, not differing conspicuously from those who instinctively settle their affairs and figure out precisely how, given their looks, their abilities and their environment, they can do what they need to do in the world. With respect to these three factors, Helga was only averagely equipped.”

— Tove Ditlevsen, The Trouble with Happiness and Other Stories

That’s the opening of the book that delivered before you’ve had a chance to settle into your chair.

I know people like Helga. On certain days I am people like Helga. And Ditlevsen’s real move here is pointing out that such people are everywhere, walking around, indistinguishable from everyone who simply gets on with things and calculates exactly what their circumstances will allow them.

There’s something almost merciless about how precisely she pins the whole condition down in a handful of lines. There’s something tender in it too, because she never once mocks Helga for wanting more.

None of this caught me off guard, to be fair. This is Tove Ditlevsen we’re talking about, the writer behind The Copenhagen Trilogy, which I loved. So the voice, the preoccupations, the particular chill of her observations, came in to me already knowing the issue of what she raises.

The book collects two of her story collections in one volume: The Umbrella and The Trouble with Happiness. Together they run through scenes and episodes of domestic life, one after another. Marriages. Kitchens. Parents and children tangled up in each other. Nothing dramatic happens in the way we usually mean “dramatic.” And yet the emotional wreckage in these pages is real. Ditlevsen writes about the kind of destruction that happens over years, at close range, between people who love each other in some warped way and hurt each other anyway.

She’s fascinated by the minutiae of how people relate to one another, like the tiny cruelties, the unspoken bargains, the silences that carry entire arguments inside them. Women’s inner lives sit at the center of nearly every story, and she renders them with a kind of unsentimental clarity that I find genuinely rare.

Most of these stories are rooted in working-class Danish life, or in middle-class families coming apart at the seams, similar to The Copenhagen Trilogy. That’s Ditlevsen’s own world, and you can feel the authority of it in every detail. But she occasionally wanders into wealthier households too, and the effect is telling: the loneliness doesn’t get any smaller there. Money changes the furniture and nothing else. Whatever floor of society you’re standing on, she seems to say, the isolation finds you anyway.

The Trouble with Happiness and Other Stories is a book of small, unglamorous devastations.

My Favorite Bits

• It’s not words that reveal our character, it’s he deeds we undertake, regardless of their logic.

• But people who wanted to succeed had to have a private life that was free of problems.

• She figured everyone had their own method, in as much as it was endured, by and large. People found their own method, in as much as it was endured, by and large. People found their method just when they are about to be crushed, before it was too late.

• You can’t control your own circumstances. You can’t control your fate. All you can do is avoid people whose words stir things up, secret things, that absolutely must not be stirred up.

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Author: Tove Ditlevsen
Publication date: 3 March 2022
Number of page: 192 pages

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