The Trouble with Happiness
and Other Stories
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- 69,00 kr
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- 69,00 kr
Publisher Description
A shimmering collection of stories from the author of The Copenhagen Trilogy, translated into English for the first time
From one of Denmark's most celebrated writers and the author of Childhood, Youth and Dependency, these short stories are brief, devastating, acid-sharp portrayals of love, marriage and family in mid-century Copenhagen. Here the ordinary events of everyday life - a wife anxious not to wake her husband, a little boy losing his father's beloved knife, a married woman's obsessive longing for a yellow silk umbrella, a girl dreaming of a masquerade ball - become dark and disconcerting, as we see what lies beneath. Translated into English for the first time, these are stories that explore yearning, fear, despair and the elusiveness of that strange thing called happiness.
Translated by Michael Favala Goldman
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This quiet and devastating collection of vignettes from Ditlevsen (1917 1976) follows Goldman's recent translation of the last entry in Ditlevsen's memoir cycle The Copenhagen Trilogy. The stories mainly turn on domestic dramas, revealing all the simmering, explosive tensions found in marriage, family, and parenthood. In "The Little Shoes," a middle-aged mother is consumed by envy for her housekeeper's youth. In "A Fine Business," a woman is pained with sympathy for a single mother who, desperate for cash, accepts a cruelly low offer on her house. Often, characters imbue mundane, household objects with intense psychological meaning, as in "The Umbrella," as a husband expresses his unreasonable contempt for his wife by breaking her umbrella. The stories are simple; the characters ordinary and immensely human. Their motivations are mysterious and subtle, and Ditlevsen is acutely sensitive to the way normal life can wear at their hearts. Readers will recognize the themes of anger, disappointment, and frustration that recur within the author's universe. Alongside this discomfort, though, is the opportunity for deep transformation. Already renowned for her memoirs, Ditlevsen is now poised to win acclaim as a master of short fiction.
