Book Review: "The Trouble with Happiness" by Tove Ditlevsen

The great thing about being able to read Tove Ditlevsen is being able to identify the prime causes for concern in human interaction whilst alongside it, ignoring red flags in your own life. The observations made within this text of short fiction may start off as small annoyances, little mistakes and boundaries unset - but they evolve into abuses, ignorances and intolerances for behaviour.

It can remind you of the short fiction of Hemingway in its bubbling discontent hidden beneath the surface of something that sounds superficial or mundane. For example: there is room to compare Tove Ditlevsen's story Umbrella to Hemingway's story A Cat in the Rain as the expression for want of something simple in a world filled with people who listen but don't hear, dissatisfaction, changing times and behaviours from a spouse that feel like betrayal is all part of the underlying meaning of the story.

The whole book of stories reaches a realism that is just as bleak and tired as its protagonists with an overarching pang of guilt, these stories are like her books and keen to avoid if you succumb easily to sadness like I do. The writing is fantastically blunt without much romanticism of the surroundings, the dream-state wants are juxtaposed in their writing, becoming slightly more fanciful only to leave the reader with an unattainable feeling in their stomach, a this-won't-last if you will. Just take a look at this tense quotation from a story within the book:

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.

With all your soul, readers, we may resist this confounding statement about anxiety but even we can admit that from one time or another, we too feel the same way. A lingering nausea that builds up inside about not wanting to be somewhere is a metaphor for simply not wanting to be as the quotation progresses. It goes from 'shouldn't have gone' to 'warding off something terrible' by staying at home. (I won't tell you what exactly that is out of fear of a spoiler).

The language we can see in this book is so very depressive and yet, entirely universal to experiences that women may face in relationships. The fact that there is little control over the behaviour of another person, frankly, shows that the discontent experienced within yourself may be an amalgamation of the different discontents for you from your mother, your husband, your friends and family members. What once felt like a betrayal has now become part and parcel of your discontented nature, your self-deprication and your own habit to undervalue yourself. The author expresses this perfectly as someone who once felt a great irritability towards life because of this lack of control to someone who has practically given up trying, keeping the irritability within her soul and facing the world with an indifference - a lacking - a brilliant nothing.

I would say this: if you have read the three sections of her Copenhagen Trilogy, then this is probably a perfect off-set from that. The Copenhagen Trilogy still has small glimmers of hope here and there, there are still defiances, there are still defences and dreams and things that would make you think profoundly about the way we form our own 'selves'. This is a grand off-set from that because it feels like a fourth book. It is the bleak, miserable, unrelentingly depressing adulthood which we all trick ourselves into thinking we are not actually living - when in fact, some of us are. The tragedy is that once, in that Copenhagen Trilogy, we tried to live something else and didn't succeed. The Copenhagen Trilogy has its sadnesses and hopelessness too - but this is a new level of misery.

Never getting what you want and never receiving anything you need is a message in this text that reads like the inscriptions over the gates of hell. And, like Ford Maddox Ford, I think this has got to be one of the saddest stories I've ever heard.