Book Review: "The Trouble with Happiness and Other Stories" by Tove Ditlevsen

Advanced copy provided by NetGalley.

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.