We, the Drowned by Carsten Jensen; trans. by Charlotte Barslund and Emma Ryder

Danish journalist Carsten Jensen’s novel We, the Drowned tells the story of his hometown Marstal, a small port town on the small island of Ærø in the small Scandinavian country of Denmark. This 700-page epic recounts a century in the life of Marstal, from 1848 to 1945. It is a novel of shipping, sailing, and war, but also of family, love, and education; most trenchantly, Jensen probes the notions of solidarity and community that underlie his town’s history.

You could say that We, the Drowned separates into ’sea’ sections and ‘town’ sections. On the one hand we follow the young men of Marstal as they progress from galley hand to seaman to first mate to captain, handling trade, mutiny, travel, different seas, different ports, long journeys, shipwreck, and war. On the other hand, we follow the women, children, and old men of Marstal who populate the town for most of the year while the men are at sea, tracking education, civic development, youthful rebellion, growing up, falling in love, and growing old. But throughout the novel the same questions of community, violence, and justice recur.

The narrative follows the fortunes and tribulations of Marstal through the Madsen family. Laurids Madsen becomes famous for shooting up to the sky when his ship explodes under cannon attack, seeing St. Peter’s ass at the gates of heaven, and living to tell the tale. Like many Marstal men Laurids goes out to sea and doesn’t return. His son Albert, who we first encounter plotting retribution against the violent schoolteacher who terrorizes Marstal’s boys, grows up to be a sailor (of course) and sets out to find his father. We follow Albert to Samoa, a journey that takes us across the world’s “busy, overcrowded ports, its palm-fringed coasts and wind-lashed rocks.” When Albert returns to Marstal as an older man he becomes a town leader, building a monument to the breakwater and taking part in the growth of insurance and ship- holding companies that made Marstal rich. The novel concludes by following Albert’s somewhat-adopted son Knud Erik, who violates his widowed mother’s wishes and follows his father and his adopted father to the sea.

With the exception of a short section narrated by Albert, We, the Drowned features a strange omniscient narrator: the people of Marstal. The narratorial voices sees into the various characters’ motivations but also ranges from the extremely specific and particular–“On Wednesday we set course for Eckernförde Fjord and reached its mouth late that afternoon”–to the lyrical and general:

We never had a single hour ashore to visit the towns where w loaded and unloaded. After a year at sea we’d been to Trondheim, Stavanger, Kalmar, Varberg, Königsberg, Wismar, Lübeck, Antwerp, Grimsby, and Hull. We saw rocky coastlines, fields and woods, towers and church spires—but we came no closer to them than to castles in the air. The only land we ever felt under our feet was near the wharf, and the only buildings we entered were warehouses. The wide world we’d come to know consisted of the ship’s deck the smoky cabin, and the permanently damp berths.

As the novel moves from war to travel and trade to town development to war to trade to war again, it becomes clear that this ‘we’, as the title indicates, is the true topic of the novel. For Jensen the ‘we’ is constituted by the town’s attempts at community but also by the destructive international forces that kill Marstal’s men and leave Marstal’s wives and children alone, and often widowed.

In a moving portrayal of World War I from the civilian perspective, Jensen describes Albert Madsen’s strange and terrible premonitions of every Marstal ship that submarine warfare claims. Albert records his dreams into a cruel parody of an insurance ledger, writing the names of the ships and men on the left-hand side after he dreams them, on the right-hand side after they fall. This is surely an ironic attack on the false nationalism of war and the insufficient mutualism of Marstal’s new insurance companies.

World War Two is equally cynically portrayed as Knud Erik finds himself hardened to ignoring the plight of shipwrecked boats, an extreme violation of sailing honor and etiquette, when transporting freight in convoy for the Allies, theoretically an act of valor and solidarity. That the sailing Danes are scorned abroad when their country is occupied without a fight, and honored when their government begins to resist, all without Knud Erik and his crew stopping at home, is an indication of how divorced Jensen finds the ties of patriotism and war from actual camaraderie and solidarity.

Jensen does stray at times towards romanticizing the life of the sailor and the sea, but he also gives voice to Knud Erik’s mother Klara, who becomes a major ship owner and uses her power to cripple Marstal’s status as a major port town, because of her despair at the sea taking first her husband, then (for many decades) her son. In many ways, this epic of Marstal is an epic of international trade, for the town’s fortunes depend entirely on the vagaries of mercantilism. Marstal weathers the development of steam trade but thrives during war booms.

Its length notwithstanding, We, the Drowned is a quick and exciting read as Jensen tells stories of romances that struggle against the separation of the sexes that the shipping life implies, of the children of Marstal who creatively rebel against an authoritarian teacher and form rival and competing gangs, of the hardened captain who talks to his prized shrunken head, or of a young Marstal man who throws his step-father overboard and is later hounded out of town by the stares of children. The anecdotal style of the novel helpfully lightens the epic metaphysics of violence and community that also characterize it. You don’t need to know your jib from your stern to be carried away by We, the Drowned.

Reviewed by Daniel Benjamin

We, the Drowned by Carsten Jensen; trans. by Charlotte Barslund and Emma Ryder
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011.
Cloth. 688 pp. $28.00
ISBN-13: 9780151013777