Slow summer days in Denmark (+ a perfect book match)
Lazy days at a summer house, rekindling friendships, outdoor brunches & echoes of Virginia Woolf
“A week in the woods, by the lake, all of them together again. We can celebrate and sunbathe and make lavish dinners, sit outside in the summer night, deep in conversation until the sun rises.”
– Waist Deep by Linea Maja Ernst
After four years in Copenhagen, I’ve come to think that summer is one of the best parts of life here. After a long and grumpy winter, Danish people return to life in April. Around June, the city suddenly seems full of sun-kissed and carefree models on bikes.
Throughout July, the sun wakes you up at a ridiculous time, the bright evening light ruins your circadian rhythm even more, and you have no idea what time even is anymore.
When the weather cooperates, the parks become shared backyards for eating, drinking, and playing kongespil (everyone’s favourite game with wooden sticks). The harbours are packed with swimmers and sunbathers.
Copenhagen in summer is fantastic, but if you can get out of the city for some of it, even better. A huge number of Danes have access to a summer house and flock to them in July (a month that’s essentially a national holiday).
I’m so excited that a book that so wonderfully captures this is now translated into English: Waist Deep by Linea Maja Ernst.
“The clear, quiet morning, the fresh air, before the day is saturated with colours, heat, sounds, thousands of conversations, before all the love and idiocy, drama and banality that fills the human hours begins.”
I first read Waist Deep in the original Danish (Kun til navlen) after seeing it everywhere last year, and although my Danish is passable, I absolutely do not feel qualified to judge a book in it. But the English translation by Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg – which was released on May 8th – is excellent.
Think Virginia Woolf’s The Waves but grown-up and with sex (a lot of sex) and discussions of gender identity (also plentiful). There’s a bit of Sally Rooney in there too, but less moody and more summery.
Waist Deep feels like lazy summer days in Denmark’s rural Himmerland. It’s about where the reunited friends find themselves – a peaceful summer house by a lake in the woods – and how they spend their week together, making elaborate meals, drinking cocktails, swimming in the midday heat, and wandering through the woods to forage.
That said, Waist Deep is even more so about the characters themselves: a group of university friends now in their thirties, who spend most of the week together feeling confused, lusting over each other, and wondering how their lives could and should be.
We meet Sylvia, a “pathological daydreamer” and her beautiful girlfriend, Charlie.
Quince (Kvæde in the original Danish) is trans and embracing his changing body and identity.
Gry is the group’s “goddess of care” who knits, bakes, researches hydromythology, and is a perfect mother and wife to her bureaucrat husband, Adam.
Then there’s Karen, “their tall and commanding queen,” a high-powered newspaper editor engaged to mild-mannered writer Esben.
As they settle into a routine at the summer house – setting the table for outdoor breakfasts, dozing most the day, talking about life over evening wine – we figure out what (or who) each of them is lusting over. It’s a book about desire and togetherness, but also solitude and self-knowledge, as one character beautifully ponders:
“You have to savour the pockets you find, try to remember that this state will return, even if you forget the feeling of it: of purity, that liminal space between dreaming and waking, aware and alone, before the veil of the shared world is pulled aside, part of the world's preparations; to be here, quiet as a mouse, like a spectator at a dress rehearsal.”
If you don’t like books about sex, absolutely do not read Waist Deep. If you don’t want to hear regular commentaries on gender and heteronormativity, this is also not your book.
If I could change anything, I wish the book were a little bit more subtle, with more show than tell. Similarly, it felt a bit too on the nose to spell out the comparisons to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, To the Lighthouse, and Call Me By Your Name.
Saying that, I love the reason why one character re-reads To the Lighthouse each year: “For the tremble of envy at the billowing world that the Ramsay family and their summer guests inhabit. The rolling waves, the flickering light on the sand.”
Also glorious:
“She would never in her life read a book as an example of modernism but always for its instructions on how to live: that it is possible to fling yourself at someone's feet, put your head to their knee and weep because you love them so much, because you are overwhelmed by beauty, by love, by the lake house…"
For me, the book’s setting and summer vibes make it shine. If I revisit Waist Deep, it’ll be precisely for just how dang dreamy and idyllic the setting and routines are. I mean, luxuriate in this heavenly sentence:
“Sylvia grabs an aged, crystallised havarti cheese and Gruyere from the fridge, a jar of dark berry jam, decides to whip some butter with a few drops of butter into an airy mountain, gives it a critical look and sprinkles a snowfall of flaky salt that catches the sun like crystals.”
Read Waist Deep for the reminder to get up early this summer, step outdoors, and soak in the sunshine and solitude a little, remembering: “If only every day could be a dewy June morning, spent alone.”
Enjoy 💙
For more books like Waist Deep to add to your summer reading list, you might like my previous collection of books that feel like escaping to a Scandinavian summer house over on Tolstoy Therapy.