Member Reviews

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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