Read #162

Tove Ditlevsen: The Trouble with Happiness (trans Michael Favala Goldman)

Ditlevsen is apparently better known in her native Denmark as a poet, having never read any of her poetry, the power of these short stories make me wonder just how ferociously good her poetry must be. Born in 1917, in a working class neighbourhood of Copenhagen, she was a successful and noted writer in many forms, producing 29 books in total. Her private life was full of upheaval – 4 marriages and divorces – she struggled with addiction and was admitted to psychiatric care several times. By the time she took her own life, aged 58, she was one of Denmark’s most celebrated writers.

This book contains 21 stories, coming in at an economical 180 pages. They are brisk, brittle, claustrophobic, razor-sharp, based around suburban family life and expectations and some have cleverly disguised ‘reveals’ towards the end of the story – when you realise that a child is not the child of its ‘parents’ as it has been led to believe, or that the husband being discussed has actually left the family home – there are quite a lot of unfaithful fathers, leaving the mother with kids as he sets out with a younger woman; and as many overbearing mothers who cannot / will not their children become adults and leave home. One other recurrent theme is ‘lost childhood’.

“The most important thing is probably always precisely the thing you can’t have. That’s where all the happiness is.“

There are obsessions – a wife’s for a silk umbrella; a boy’s for a lost hunting knife; a wife desperate for a reason to sack the beautiful young housemaid, who may or may not be sleeping with her teenage son. With story titles like, “My Wife Doesn’t Dance”, “His Mother”, “Depression”, “Anxiety”, “Perpetuation”… and so on, you get the picture.

The Best Joke begins: “One morning he was sitting on the edge of the bed and he was getting divorced. His wife was standing somewhere in the room talking. Something about her mother and someone else. Home to her mother; found someone else. And at seven in the morning, when you haven’t filled out your body yet and you’re cold and you have to go to work. He picked his nose and didn’t understand how anyone could get so ugly in five years.“

Her most celebrated work, The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood, Youth and Dependency, sits waiting on my bedside table. and I am more than eager to get to it.