Book Review - Waist Deep
A summer reunion of university friends at a lakeside cabin in rural Denmark is the setting for Danish writer Linea Maja Ernst’s evocative debut about the fragility and fluidity of adult friendship. Sylvia is bitterly disappointed when Karen and Esben announce that they are getting married at the end of the week’s holiday. Sylvia, bisexual and a self-confessed “drama queen”, has never confronted her decades long crush on Esben, now a successful writer. “She likes the person she becomes when he’s there”, she muses, while comparing him to “a German idealist poet, distant and romantic like a tarot-card page, a boyish feudal prince.” But Sylvia’s unresolved longing is complicated by the presence of her faithful, pragmatic girlfriend Charlie.
Gry arrives with her clean-cut husband Adam - “a sun god with a political science degree” - and two children. Quince, a Puck-ish transman completes the group. Quince finally feels happy in his body, able to reflect on his identity with wry humour: “Now, when he makes a scene, he is read as gay, not girly.”
They swim, sunbathe and take turns to cook. The five friends had studied literary and cultural theory and there are some playful digressions about books and art. Sylvia vividly recalls the joys of communal living, discovering new things together, but careers and parenthood have shaped them in different ways and her nostalgia threatens not only to disrupt the group’s harmony but also her relationship with Charlie.
Ernst, a staff writer for Weekendavisen, offers a nuanced portrait of thirty-something millennials. She has a good ear for dialogue - Adam’s acerbic put-downs often hit the mark - and she deftly conveys the emotional undercurrents of sexual desire. Ernst shifts fluidly between perspectives, the characters’ different needs and expectations, although their private meditations on each other are inevitably snapshots.
Waist Deep is an enjoyable page-turner, a sympathetic and perceptive examination of the importance of moving on and letting go, seamlessly translated by Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg.