The Trouble with Happiness

And Other Stories

By: Tove Ditlevsen, Michael Favala Goldman - translator

Narrated by: Stine Wintlev

2022 Vogue Magazine Best Books of the Year, Long-listed

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 listeners a new chance to encounter the quietly devastating work of this essential 20th Century writer.

©2022 Tove Ditlevsen and Michael Favala Goldman (P)2022 Macmillan Audio

Amazing prose.

Ditlevsen manages to discribe the most mondaine pain of women with an amazing prose. Narrator is so good.