“I’ve always had a feeling that there’s something nasty in those words, ‘I love you’ … something that insists, demands, gives rights.” So thinks Martina, halfway through this searching novel of her troubled relationship with Gustav, whose love for her will be satisfied only when she is bound to him by a band of gold.
First published in 1976, and set in the late 1960s, Gun-Britt Sundström’s third novel sparked a firestorm of discussion in her native Sweden. Sundström (b.1945) has sixteen books to her name, but this is the first to be translated – quite seamlessly, by Kathy Saranpa – into English. Its original title, Maken, translates as “the husband”, and it is as such that Martina refers to Gustav, soon after his first wooing of her, which happens to coincide with her embarking on Pride and Prejudice.
Gustav is a philosophy student and Dostoevsky fan. His dogged courtship of Martina, who is studying literature, involves him sending her unwanted flowers along with quotes from the Old Testament, to which she learns quickly to respond in kind. Soon, they are weekending in a cottage owned by his parents, who are dubious about this romance. (Are the young couple sleeping together?) They read, they sail, they talk all night and they walk the landscape that is Martina’s deepest love. Anything seems possible as she wanders alone in “blankets of windflowers beneath the trees, now and again a rain shower, as light as a whisper”. Meanwhile, Gustav peels potatoes. He likes the notion of service.
In Stockholm, where they each have run-down flats, they see films – Buñuel, Pasolini, Chaplin. They cycle together to seminars, anti-Vietnam demonstrations, discursive gatherings in student bars. They are children of their time, and mostly content to be so, except when the freewheeling Martina questions Gustav’s insistence that they cement their relationship. He longs for commitment (and more sex). She frets over questions of personal autonomy in relentless self-questioning that moves from irony to bewilderment to the inevitable cul-de-sac of desiring a middle ground: “Married or divorced? Neither nor. Both and”.
As inconclusive years pass, the relationship is strained by distance and (vaguely) by Gustav’s sex drive. He gets a job teaching in the north and sleeps with a colleague, then with an actress whose husband is having an affair of his own. A subterranean loosening of the status quo seems under way, but his insistence on Martina is unyielding. Sustained by shared readings of Kierkegaard, Sartre and Strindberg, their relationship stutters along. Reason tells them that they are essentially at odds in their vision of a future together, and they regularly decide on “divorce”, yet inevitably drift together again. “We want to have each other”, Martina explains, “we just can’t decide on the form of this having.”
Honest, self-searching, endearingly puzzled at every development, Martina is a pleasure to be with – for us, if not for Gustav. Her voice is brisk, conversational, contingent – we could almost imagine her unpacking the shopping as she explains herself. “And by the way”, she often throws in, before moving to a jump-cut non sequitur: “Is the autumn always this beautiful?”; “Is it New Year’s Eve already?” Endlessly surprised and surprising, she thinks her way to what she wants, but can’t have: “Loving each other distractedly, whistling and looking the other way – maybe that’s the only form of love that wouldn’t give me claustrophobia.”
This being a long-gone era of generous student grants and plentiful cheap accommodation, Martina has no worries about the practicalities of life (and no need of a Darcy for financial support). Her concerns are abstract, and existential. She ruminates constantly on her purpose in life, takes jobs that bore her, embarks on a doctorate, discusses Gustav with her friend Harriet, who lives in a commune, and with Cilla, who has sobering advice: “You can’t have everything … You’re not the first person to try, but you’ll be the first person to succeed if you do. You have to choose”.
Perhaps foolishly, perhaps necessarily, Martina chooses not to choose. “Why can’t I be like people in novels?” she asks Harriet as Engagement nears its close. Would she feel less lonely that way?, her friend asks. She replies that she would feel more “real”. “Reality is so messy”, she ruefully concludes. It feels a light judgement of her predicament, but it seems to imply something more brutal on the part of her clear-eyed narration when we find that a “messy” reality is denied this struggling young woman. Fifty years later, it might be different. Martina is only thirty when her story ends, and has a long way to go to find ways to liberation – in fiction as in in life.
Sheena Joughin is writing a book about madness and women writers
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