The Trouble with Happiness, Tove Ditlevsen
The Trouble with Happiness, Tove Ditlevsen
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The Trouble with Happiness
And Other Stories

Author: Tove Ditlevsen, Michael Favala Goldman

Narrator: Stine Wintlev

Unabridged: 5 hr 25 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 04/19/2022


Synopsis

The Trouble with Happiness is a short-story collection from Tove Ditlevsen, the acclaimed author of the Copenhagen Trilogy, never before translated in English

A newly married woman longs, irrationally, for a silk umbrella; a husband chases away his wife’s beloved cat; a betrayed mother impulsively sacks her housekeeper. Underneath the surface of these precisely observed tales of marriage and family life in mid-century Copenhagen pulse currents of desire, violence, and despair, as women and men struggle to escape from the roles assigned to them and dream of becoming free and happy—without ever truly understanding what that might mean.

Tove Ditlevsen is one of Denmark’s most famous and beloved writers, and her autobiographical Copenhagen Trilogy was hailed as a masterpiece on re-publication in English, lauded for its wry humor, limpid prose, and powerful honesty. The poignant and understated stories in The Trouble with Happiness, written in the 1950s and 1960s and never before translated into English, offer readers a new chance to encounter the quietly devastating work of this essential twentieth-century writer.

About Tove Ditlevsen

Tove Ditlevsen was born in 1917 in a working-class neighborhood in Copenhagen. Her first volume of poetry was published when she was in her early twenties and was followed by many more books, including the three volumes of the Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood (1967), Youth (1967), and Dependency (1971). She died in 1976.


Reviews

For all the struggling women out there even though we are not starving or begging or beaten or abused and everyone else thinks we have to be alive and be quiet and beautiful. Yes, we all struggle with life. Our conditions are just different as portrayed in these twenty short stories. If you're not an......more

Goodreads review by Emily

A solemn collection of dashed dreams and words left unsaid. Each story, filled with sorrow and drawn from Ditlevsen’s own memories, the Trouble with Happiness is a prism of despair and the longing to escape the confines of domestic life and sparkles marriages. This collection is the haunting echo of......more

Goodreads review by Jaylen

Tove said: Men - TRASH; Domesticity - OVER; Marriage - A TRAP; Parenthood - CANCELLED. Bleak! And a great companion to The Copenhagen Trilogy for some third-person counterbalancing. The stories do tend to blend together, but it works in the sense that Ditlevsen was preoccupied with the mundanity of......more


Awards

  • Vogue Magazine Best Books of the Year