Carsten Jensen’s debut novel has taken the world by storm. Already hailed in Europe as an instant classic, We, the Drowned is the story of the port town of Marstal, whose inhabitants have sailed the world’s oceans aboard freight ships for centuries. Spanning over a hundred years, from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of the Second World War, and from the barren rocks of Newfoundland to the lush plantations of Samoa, from the roughest bars in Tasmania, to the frozen coasts of northern Russia, We, the Drowned spins a magnificent tale of love, war, and adventure, a tale of the men who go to sea and the women they leave behind.
Ships are wrecked at sea and blown up during wars, they are places of terror and violence, yet they continue to lure each generation of Marstal menfathers and sonsaway. Strong, resilient, women raise families alone and sometimes take history into their own hands. There are cannibals here, shrunken heads, prophetic dreams, forbidden passions, cowards, heroes, devastating tragedies, and miraculous survivalseverything that a town like Marstal has actually experienced, and that makes We, the Drowned an unforgettable novel, destined to take its place among the greatest seafaring literature.
A Q & A with Author Carsten Jensen
Q: We, the Drowned has become an international sensation. Are you surprised at the universal appeal of this story?
A: I had already worked for a couple of years on We, the Drowned when my female cousin asked me a very unsettling question. Do you really think, she asked me, that this novel of yours is going to interest anyone outside of our little island?
I could only say: I hope so, but there was no way I could know. I did everything I could to see the universal aspects of the history of a little seafaring town on a forgotten island in a remote corner of the Baltic. But I had to admit it was a very local story, and maybe that was what interested me: the meeting between the local and the global, because that is what the sailor is: somebody who goes everywhere. The sailor is a universal figure.
But writing a novel is always taking a risk. You never know whether there is anyone out there until you have tried reaching them. The sailor often sails into the unknown. So does the writer.
Q:What is it about sailing, the allure of the sea, that draws so many men, and you to write about it? What do you think is the modern equivalent of taking to the sea?
A: A farmer in a traditional farming community is not drawn to the soil. He has no choice. Neither had the sailors of Marstal. This was the only livelihood open to them. Whether they decided to enlist on the Seagull or the Albatros, that was all the choice they had. There was nothing romantic about it.
After the book was published I was invited to have coffee with the Admiral of the Danish Navy, Niels Vang, who turned out to be a great fan of the book. The only people today laboring under the same harsh conditions as the sailors in your book, he said to me, are professional soldiers. They are the only ones confronted with the possibility of dying on the job in the same way that your sailors were.
Q: You have called the sailor the forefather of globalization. Do you, as a journalist, relate to the sailor?
A: When the sailor returned to his hometown he knew one thing the farmers back home never knew: that there was more than one way of doing things. The farmer thought he was the center of the world, the sailor knew he wasn’t. I think this a healthy knowledge.
Q: How did you research the novel, which spans 100 years and many oceans?
A: I did a lot of research for the book, but I also made a lot of things up. I was helped by the sailor’s museum of Marstal, a totally homegrown, very eccentric museum. They have an amazing archive, and when I dove into it, I realized that within the last 20 to 30 years, one half of the inhabitants of Marstal have done nothing but interview the other half.
Then, together with the local public library, I organized a lot of town meetings where I read from the work in progress and explained my ideas. The people of Marstal, being very curious, showed up in great numbers. I made it clear to them that this was part of a deal: I would give them a book about their town, but I needed their help, too. So I was invited home, seated in the sofa, served coffee, and then I was presented with old letters, diaries, and unpublished memories meant for only the closest family. All this became a huge source of inspiration for me. It also meant that the whole town really ended up feeling that this was their book as much as mine.
And after the publication of the book, many of the townspeople told me that they had heard all the stories in the book as children, and I said: But you can’t have because I made them up. I was inspired, yes, but not to the extent that I just wrote everything I heard. But people could no longer distinguish reality from fiction.
Q: We, the Drowned is written in first person plural, as a collective consciousness of the people of Marstal. Why did you choose to write the book this way?
A: The "we" telling the story represents the collective memory of the town, but not everybody is included. It is the memory of the men, since the lives of men and women are so dramatically different in a seafaring community. The women have their own separate story slowing unfolding in the novel alongside that of the men.
The "we" is a kind of Greek chorus forever present on the stage, always commenting and introducing, but as a storyteller the "we" is also involved in the story, partial and taking sides, which means that it is not always reliable.
The "we" seems all-knowing, but how can it know the most intimate things that go on between people? Well, maybe it doesn’t know. What you don’t know in a small community you invent and that is also called gossip. Gossip is an essential part of people’s lives, and this is what I want my novel to mirror. It is full of real history, fiction, and gossip, too, because that is how the world works.
*Starred Review* Marstal is a Danish port town where manhood is defined by the punishing, often fatal life of a sailor, and womanhood by grief. Not only is shipboard existence full of hazard and hardship (Jensen conjures monstrous first mates and appalling captains); the town is no picnic either, as education involves more beatings than books and bullying is legion. So, too, is the horror and inanity of war as this stormy tale navigates a century from the bloody nautical battle of 1849 between Denmark and Germany, in which protagonist Laurids’ amazing survival becomes the stuff of legend, to the diabolical U-boat attacks of the world wars. But for all the brutality and suspense in the manner of Conrad, Melville, and Stevenson, Danish writer Jensen’s oceanic first novel (already a best-seller overseas and gorgeously translated) is tenderly human. Laurids’ son, Albert, confronts evil in myriad forms yet holds fast to his belief in fellowship, progress, and balance. He eventually mentors a fatherless boy, Knud Erik, who becomes another hero of conscience, however tormented. Jensen’s resplendent saga, an epic voyage of the imagination, is mesmerizing in its unsparing drama, fascinating in its knowledge of the sea, wryly humorous, and profound in its embrace of compassion, reason, and justice. --Donna Seaman
Review
We, The Drowned is "most memorable for the sheer gusto of its narrative. The author ennobles the old-fashioned art of storytelling by showing how the relating of a tale can itself foster a spirit of fellowship... We, The Drowned is itself a monument to the way that history can be made epic through legend."
-Wall Street Journal
"As an epic of grand design, We, The Drowned is a thumping success."
—San Francisco Chronicle
"Powerful reading for a long winter's night... This gorgeous, unsparing novel ends during the last days of World War II with a captain struggling to bring his crew home after their ship is torpedoed. The sea is Marstal's life and Jensen's unstrained metaphor: luring the Marstallers away from home, offering uncertain passage and providing few harbors that are safe for long."
—Washington Post
"From adventures on the storm-ravaged seas and in exotic lands, to battles in town over the shipping industry and family life, dozens of stories coalesce into an odyssey taut with action and drama and suffused with enough heart to satisfy readers who want more than the breakneck thrills of ships battling the elements."
—Publishers Weekly (starred)
"For all the brutality and suspense in the manner of Conrad, Melville, and Stevenson, Jensen's oceanic novel (already a bestseller overseas and gorgeously translated) is tenderly human . . . Jensen's resplendent saga, an epic voyage of the imagination, is mesmerizing in its unsparing drama, fascinating in its knowledge of the sea, wryly humorous, and profound in its embrace of compassion, reason, and justice."
—Booklist (starred)
"Expertly told . . . Jensen is a sympathetic storyteller with an eye for the absurd, with the result that if this novel descends from Moby-Dick, it also looks to The Tin Drum for inspiration . . . An elegant meditation on life, death, and the ways of the sea."
—Kirkus Reviews
"...vast and daring... rich, powerful and rewarding... one of the more engrossing literary vorages of recent years."
—Financial Times (UK)
"Carsten Jensen is without doubt one of the most exciting authors in Nordic literature today. I always wait with great anticipation for his books. He is, in my opinion, completely unique as a story teller."
—Henning Mankell
"A novel of immense authority and ambition and beauty, by a master storyteller at the height of his powers. This is a book to sail into, to explore, to get lost in, but it is also a book that brings the reader, dazzled by wonders, home to the heart from which great stories come."
—Joseph O’Connor, author of Star of the Sea
From the Inside Flap
Hailed in Europe as an instant classic, We, the Drowned is the story of the port town of Marstal, whose inhabitants sailed the world s oceans aboard freight ships for centuries. Spanning over a hundred years, from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of the Second World War from the barren rocks of Newfoundland to the lush plantations of Samoa, from the roughest bars in Tasmania to the frozen coasts of northern Russia We, the Drowned is a magnificent tale of love, war, and adventure, of the men who go to sea and the women they leave behind.
Ships are wrecked and blown up in wars, they are places of terror and violence, yet they continue to lure each generation of Marstallers. Among them are Laurids Madsen, who vanishes in the South Pacific; his son Albert, who searches the globe for his father; Knud Erik and his widowed mother, Klara, who takes on here, shrunken heads, prophetic dreams, forbidden passions, cowards, heroes, devastating tragedies, and miraculous survivals everything that a town like Marstal has actually lived. We, the Drowned is a novel destined to take its place among the greatest seafaring literature.
From the Back Cover
Hailed in Europe as an instant classic, We, the Drowned is the story of the port town of Marstal, whose inhabitants sailed the world’s oceans aboard freight ships for centuries. Spanning over a hundred years, from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of the Second World War—from the barren rocks of Newfoundland to the lush plantations of Samoa, from the roughest bars in Tasmania to the frozen coasts of northern Russia—We, the Drowned is a magnificent tale of love, war, and adventure, of the men who go to sea and the women they leave behind.
Ships are wrecked and blown up in wars, they are places of terror and violence, yet they continue to lure each generation of Marstallers. Among them are Laurids Madsen, who vanishes in the South Pacific; his son Albert, who searches the globe for his father; Knud Erik and his widowed mother, Klara, who takes on here, shrunken heads, prophetic dreams, forbidden passions, cowards, heroes, devastating tragedies, and miraculous survivals—everything that a town like Marstal has actually lived. We, the Drowned is a novel destined to take its place among the greatest seafaring literature.
About the Author
As a boy in Marstal, Denmark, CARSTEN JENSEN sailed on his father’s boat, a 220-ton freighter named the Abelone. In 2000, he returned to Marstal to write We, the Drowned. He has also worked as a literary critic and a journalist, reporting from China, Cambodia, Latin America, the Pacific Islands, and Afghanistan.
We, the Drowned won Denmark’s most important literary prize, while also being selected by readers of a major daily newspaper as the best Danish novel of the last twenty-five years. It was a bestseller throughout Scandinavia and in Germany, and has also been published in the United Kingdom, Spain, and France.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Boots
Many years ago there lived a man called Laurids Madsen, who went up to Heaven and came down again, thanks to his boots.
He didn’t soar as high as the tip of the mast on a full-rigged ship; in fact he got no farther than the main. Once up there, he stood outside the pearly gates and saw Saint Peter — though the guardian of the gateway to the Hereafter merely flashed his bare ass at him.
Laurids Madsen should have been dead. But death didn’t want him, and he came back down a changed man.
Until the fame he achieved from this heavenly visit, Laurids Madsen was best known for having single-handedly started a war. His father, Rasmus, had been lost at sea when Laurids was six years old. When he turned fourteen he shipped aboard the Anna of Marstal, his native town on the island of Ærø, but the ship was lost in the Baltic only three months later. The crew was rescued by an American brig and from then on Laurids Madsen dreamt of America.
He’d passed his navigation exam in Flensburg when he was eighteen and the same year he was shipwrecked again, this time off the coast of Norway near Mandal, where he stood on a rock with the waves slapping on a cold October night, scanning the horizon for salvation. For the next five years he sailed the seven seas. He went south around Cape Horn and heard penguins scream in the pitch-black night. He saw Valparaiso, the west coast of America, and Sydney, where the kangaroos hop and the trees shed bark in winter and not their leaves. He met a girl with eyes like grapes by the name of Sally Brown, and could tell stories about Foretop Street, La Boca, Barbary Coast, and Tiger Bay. He boasted about his first equator crossing, when he’d saluted Neptune and felt the bump as the ship passed the line: his fellow sailors had marked the occasion by forcing him to drink salt water, fish oil, and vinegar; they’d baptized him in tar, lamp soot, and glue; shaved him with a rusty razor with dents in its blade; and tended to his cuts with stinging salt and lime. They made him kiss the ocher-colored cheek of the pockmarked Amphitrite and forced his nose down her bottle of smelling salts, which they’d filled with nail clippings.
Laurids Madsen had seen the world.
So had many others. But he was the only one to return to Marstal with the peculiar notion that everything there was too small, and to prove his point, he frequently spoke in a foreign tongue he called American, which he’d learned when he sailed with the naval frigate Neversink for a year.
“Givin nem belong mi Laurids Madsen,” he said.
He had three sons and a daughter with Karoline Grube from Nygade: Rasmus, named after his grandfather, and Esben and Albert. The girl’s name was Else and she was the oldest. Rasmus, Esben, and Else took after their mother, who was short and taciturn, while Albert resembled his father: at the age of four he was already as tall as Esben, who was three years his senior. His favorite pastime was rolling around an English cast-iron cannonball, which was far too heavy for him to lift — not that it stopped him from trying. Stubborn-faced, he’d brace his knees and strain.
“Heave away, my jolly boys! Heave away, my bullies!” Laurids shouted in encouragement, as he watched his youngest son struggling with it.
The cannonball had come crashing through the roof of their house in Korsgade during the English siege of Marstal in 1808, and it had put Laurids’s mother in such a fright that she promptly gave birth to him right in the middle of the kitchen floor. When little Albert wasn’t busy with the cannonball it lived in the kitchen, where Karoline used it as a mortar for crushing mustard seeds. “It could have been you announcing your arrival, my boy,” Laurids’s father had once said to him, “seeing how big you were when you were born. If the stork had dropped you, you would have gone through the roof like an English cannonball.”
“Finggu,” Laurids said, holding up his finger.
He wanted to teach the children the American language.
Fut meant foot. He pointed to his boot. Maus was mouth.
He rubbed his belly when they sat down to eat. He bared his teeth.
“Hanggre.”
They all understood he was telling them he was hungry.
Ma was misis, Pa papa tru. When Laurids was absent, they said “Mother” and “Father” like normal children, except for Albert. He had a special bond with his father.
The children had many names, pickaninnies, bullies, and hearties.
“Laihim tumas,” Laurids said to Karoline, and pursed his lips as if he was about to kiss her.
She blushed and laughed, and then got angry.
“Don’t be such a fool, Laurids,” she said.
Nature was neither fair nor unfair. Those terms belonged to the world of men.Highlighted by 179 Kindle readers
