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3.88 AVERAGE
3.88 AVERAGE
I love Tove Ditlevsen…. My extraordinarily depressed queen…
dark
reflective
sad
medium-paced
dark
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
Lots of short depressing stories. Always just everyday things that could happen to anyone
Coming to this short story collection after reading [b:Childhood, Youth, Dependency: The Copenhagen Trilogy|50742897|Childhood, Youth, Dependency The Copenhagen Trilogy|Tove Ditlevsen|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1581274509l/50742897._SY75_.jpg|62438608], I came to like Tove Ditlevsen’s style. Dark, grim, and pessimistic, yet her stories resonate with the reality of lonely urban life and its exploitation of individuals. Aside from the titular The Trouble with Happiness, the short stories featured in this collection are fictional. Mostly, they deal with stories of unhappy families, often at the expense of the women who get disadvantaged in their situations due to sudden divorces or inabilities to voice their opinions against their husbands.
The book opens with a short story entitled The Umbrella. Helga, the heroine, is described as 'expected more from life than it could deliver.' But Helga is not far from our reality. Often, we’re unhappy because our expectations are higher than what happens in real-life situations. Happiness is about managing expectations, to be content with what we have. And that’s the heart of the matter with Tove’s characters. As the title suggests, what Helga wants is not a luxury item to have. She wants an umbrella, for the simple reason that it reminds her to a woman with an umbrella that she remembered from her childhood. Yet the simple desire is rejected by her husband. Sometimes it’s not that we have unrealistic expectations. Perhaps we asked the wrong people, or we asked them at the wrong time, or we were just unlucky.
Another story, The Knife tells about a father who entrusted a knife that has been passed from his father to his son, an inter-generational inheritance. His son frequently loses his belongings, but the father insists that the knife is a special item. When his son loses the knife, the father tells him to find it by night, asserting his dominance over his family. Leaving his office, he was prepared to scold the boy for losing the knife. Yet he was appalled by the fact that the boy found the knife. He was unhappy with the development. Like in some other stories in this collection too, Tove also guides her readers to analyse our unhappiness as something intergenerational. Sometimes the problems didn’t begin with us, unfinished problems in childhood might resurface in adulthood – and perhaps, in the next generation – as desires to show dominance in our households, for no apparent reason.
There’s also a story that shows women's exploitation by men in A Fine Business. A woman has just been divorced and quickly ran into debt to cover daily expenses for her three children. Her husband told her to sell their house to cover the expenses. She was prepared to sell the house for 25,000 kroner. A real estate agent helps a new couple looking for a house to acquire the house for only 20,000 kroner, knowing the woman is desperate to earn money, while the couple is willing to pay the original price. The woman owning the house is looking for the wife of the man who is buying the house, hoping for their sisterhood to help bring a fair transaction. Yet she was left dumbfounded. ‘You don’t even know the person you’re married to,’ she repeats. There are times when we thought we know someone who has been accompanying us for years, only to be confronted by the fact that we don’t really know the person. People change, feelings aren’t permanent, and there’s simply no consolation or solution for the hurt (and by extension, economic problems for divorced women), which is a sad fact in life.
Tove’s stories, unique for the time they were published, bring about the message about the unfairness of modern life and the women marginalised by it. Through her stories, she questions the sustainability of a nuclear family, with the rising rates of divorces and the inability of women in her stories to support their children and themselves with their working-class backgrounds, something close to Tove’s personal experience. But sometimes humans are just numb to situations after getting “comfortable”. We begin to take things for granted, in what Tove says, ‘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.’
The book opens with a short story entitled The Umbrella. Helga, the heroine, is described as 'expected more from life than it could deliver.' But Helga is not far from our reality. Often, we’re unhappy because our expectations are higher than what happens in real-life situations. Happiness is about managing expectations, to be content with what we have. And that’s the heart of the matter with Tove’s characters. As the title suggests, what Helga wants is not a luxury item to have. She wants an umbrella, for the simple reason that it reminds her to a woman with an umbrella that she remembered from her childhood. Yet the simple desire is rejected by her husband. Sometimes it’s not that we have unrealistic expectations. Perhaps we asked the wrong people, or we asked them at the wrong time, or we were just unlucky.
Another story, The Knife tells about a father who entrusted a knife that has been passed from his father to his son, an inter-generational inheritance. His son frequently loses his belongings, but the father insists that the knife is a special item. When his son loses the knife, the father tells him to find it by night, asserting his dominance over his family. Leaving his office, he was prepared to scold the boy for losing the knife. Yet he was appalled by the fact that the boy found the knife. He was unhappy with the development. Like in some other stories in this collection too, Tove also guides her readers to analyse our unhappiness as something intergenerational. Sometimes the problems didn’t begin with us, unfinished problems in childhood might resurface in adulthood – and perhaps, in the next generation – as desires to show dominance in our households, for no apparent reason.
There’s also a story that shows women's exploitation by men in A Fine Business. A woman has just been divorced and quickly ran into debt to cover daily expenses for her three children. Her husband told her to sell their house to cover the expenses. She was prepared to sell the house for 25,000 kroner. A real estate agent helps a new couple looking for a house to acquire the house for only 20,000 kroner, knowing the woman is desperate to earn money, while the couple is willing to pay the original price. The woman owning the house is looking for the wife of the man who is buying the house, hoping for their sisterhood to help bring a fair transaction. Yet she was left dumbfounded. ‘You don’t even know the person you’re married to,’ she repeats. There are times when we thought we know someone who has been accompanying us for years, only to be confronted by the fact that we don’t really know the person. People change, feelings aren’t permanent, and there’s simply no consolation or solution for the hurt (and by extension, economic problems for divorced women), which is a sad fact in life.
Tove’s stories, unique for the time they were published, bring about the message about the unfairness of modern life and the women marginalised by it. Through her stories, she questions the sustainability of a nuclear family, with the rising rates of divorces and the inability of women in her stories to support their children and themselves with their working-class backgrounds, something close to Tove’s personal experience. But sometimes humans are just numb to situations after getting “comfortable”. We begin to take things for granted, in what Tove says, ‘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.’
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
reflective
medium-paced
This was fairly interesting, I liked a lot of the parallels drawn and the way married life was explored (particularly in the umbrella one and the cat one) but overall I’m not sure how much of this I’ll remember.
okay if this book is any indication then the danes are much more melancholic than i observed while in copenhagen (which, much of this book takes place in the suburbs or countryside, so my perception was very much bottle-necked). Tove Ditlevsen was able to create this unique stringing between stories that made each feel so related, something i had never experienced in a collection of short stories. despite the title i think this small read articulated the emptiness of sadness and contempt incredibly well and found that each character carried so much depth in a matter of pages. not my favorite read of the year, but i wouldn’t stop a friend from reading it!
“Being married to an entire person was too much. It was too much to grasp. It was intimidating, overwhelming. She didn't know how he could stand it, or when his method started. She figured everyone had their own method, inasmuch as it was endured, by and large. People found their method just when they were about to be crushed, before it was too late. Adapting a little at a time was hers; then things would be fine for a long while, until the method's unresolved limit was reached. It was that dangerous area right around his nose, and, well, the nose itself, which she couldn't handle. When the days of the nose arrived, she tried avoiding them, first by distracting herself, then with anxious, fake joviality: No, no, my friend, we'll skip over you just this once. Goodness knows, who hasn't been forced to stand in a corner or been a bench warmer one happy evening? It's part of life, it's the way the world is. She would try starting from scratch with the hands. But that never worked. The hands were deeply insulted and distant, in solidarity with the nose. Amazing how a body teams up so obstinately!”
“Being married to an entire person was too much. It was too much to grasp. It was intimidating, overwhelming. She didn't know how he could stand it, or when his method started. She figured everyone had their own method, inasmuch as it was endured, by and large. People found their method just when they were about to be crushed, before it was too late. Adapting a little at a time was hers; then things would be fine for a long while, until the method's unresolved limit was reached. It was that dangerous area right around his nose, and, well, the nose itself, which she couldn't handle. When the days of the nose arrived, she tried avoiding them, first by distracting herself, then with anxious, fake joviality: No, no, my friend, we'll skip over you just this once. Goodness knows, who hasn't been forced to stand in a corner or been a bench warmer one happy evening? It's part of life, it's the way the world is. She would try starting from scratch with the hands. But that never worked. The hands were deeply insulted and distant, in solidarity with the nose. Amazing how a body teams up so obstinately!”
emotional
reflective
sad
fast-paced
The trouble with happiness is that it comes in two different forms: one that is dictated by social conventions, and one that exists outside of them. Ditlevsen’s short stories paint a grave image that details the internal conflict we face when choosing between the two of them. As well as detailing how these conflicts change when intersected with gender, age, and class (race is not mentioned).
I would recommend reading this after The Copenhagen Trilogy as that provides you with almost too much contextual understanding of Ditlevsen’s own personal experience navigating these issues. You’ll understand her words more in depth but you won’t find yourself feeling any happiness because of it.
I would recommend reading this after The Copenhagen Trilogy as that provides you with almost too much contextual understanding of Ditlevsen’s own personal experience navigating these issues. You’ll understand her words more in depth but you won’t find yourself feeling any happiness because of it.