On the Coffee Table: Carsten Jensen

Title: We, the Drowned
Author: Carsten Jensen

via Amazon

We, the Drowned covers about a century of history (1848-1945) in the Danish port town of Marstal.  The story is told through the sailors who spent years at a time at sea and the women - their mothers, wives, daughters, etc. - who stayed behind.  In particular, we follow Laurids Madsen who should by all rights have been killed in a naval battle, his son Albert who grew up to become one of the most powerful men in town and Albert's not quite adopted son Knud Erik who miraculously survived World War II, despite spending nearly all of it in hostile waters.  The book is beautifully written, much of it in a strange first person plural with an unspecified narrator, apparently typical of Scandinavian storytelling - told from the perspective of the community.

I'll admit to additional personal interest in the subject matter.  My ethnicity is a sampling of various Northern European lines and primarily Danish.  Interestingly, my wife also has some Danish in her background, a rare overlap in our Venn diagram.  My grandmother's family left Denmark for good in the early 1920s, a period covered in the book's span.  They were farmers and Jensen's story makes a clear cultural distinction between the sailors and the farmers, though the two societies lived within a few miles of each other.  The relevance to my own family history: the farmers were the ones who emigrated.  The sailors were already traveling the world.  The question was whether they'd ever make it back home.  I have long been curious about the fact that the United States was so heavily peopled by those who left where they were, whether by choice or not.  It's a fact which I think has huge bearing on our national mindset.  It's not as if other countries emptied entirely into the new world.  Most people stayed.  What does it mean for our nation that we are descended from the ones who left?

The story is large and sprawling, though there are a few themes tying it all together: the senselessness and brutality of war - any war; the power of the sea over a community's collective consciousness, potent even when some actively fight it and the gap in life experience between the men and women of the town.  There were some rough patches for me - a lot of brutal, senseless violence early on and I felt a lot more involved whenever the book latched onto one personal story for a while.   But overall, We, the Drowned is an enriching read.