The novel is often described as a “feminist classic”, which Sundström resists – the implication being that any political objective undermines its integrity as a novel. “Feminist books ordinarily end with a happy divorce. And this doesn’t.” Instead, Engagement is a dense, thoughtful book that takes on questions of sex, boredom, self-esteem and what Sundström calls, “the moral issue; the question of can you treat another person this way, the way Martina [treats Gustav]? At the end, she herself comes to the conclusion that you can’t, it isn’t right. She can’t go on exploiting him, because he’s helplessly in love with her.” The book is less about the experience of loving someone than about being the object of love, and given current discussions around young women “decentring men” and “heteropessimism”, it is a startlingly modern novel.
What’s in a pen name? Irish writer Liadan Ní Chuinn’s debut short story collection, Every One Still Here, is receiving rave reviews and rapturous praise, but hardly anyone seems to know who they are. A cursory Google turns up no photos or biographical information. All we know is that the writer is Northern Irish and was born in 1998, the year of the Good Friday agreement.
However you rate lunch, it is probably the original meal—for much of history, procuring food and finding fuel to cook it with took so long that people were unable to eat until several hours after waking up. At the same time, the amount of physical labor early humans performed required them to consume the bulk of the day’s calories as soon as they were available. “So eating meant lunching if we take lunch to be the meal eaten in the middle of the day,” the food historian Megan Elias writes in “Lunch: A History.” As a class system emerged, the rich began to eat multiple times a day. The middle class followed, and eventually advances in lighting technology expanded the duration of daily activity, allowing for extended eating hours. By around 1850, the midday mono-meal had diversified into the three-meal system that now dominates Western culture.
Nothing, in Forrest’s writing, is ever simple. Things are deceptive, untidy and uneasy – and happen when you least expect it. Actions have consequences, and those consequences can change the shape of everything – which is, I suppose, always the true lesson of adolescence. And the true, tricky, slippery lesson of Forrest’s novel.
What’s captivating about her book is all the thinking she does mid- or post-trek: on writing, friendship, welfare, illness, Charles Atlas, climate change, protest marches, knitting, and why it is that in popular mythology “walking women” are either models on a catwalk or sex workers. As she wanders, her mind wanders. Solvitur ambulando: she’s not sure what exactly it is she’s trying to solve by walking, but the book’s as much an invigorating mental workout as it is a hard physical trudge.