We, The Drowned

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Todo tiene un balance, una porción de tragedia y otra de sonrisas (que son pocas), pero en líneas generales el dramatismo sostiene gran parte de cada una de las historias que vamos conociendo a medida que atravesamos las distintas generaciones de estos intrépidos hombres de mar. Fusing social commentary and history with vibrant descriptions of people and places, Jensen brilliantly evokes the sights, sounds, and smells of these venerable civilizations. He examines the reverberations of the Tiananmen Square massacre in China, always attuned to the restless air of expectancy in the country, but also finds time for remote concerts of ancient Chinese music. He renders the pervasive sense of destruction, despair, and loss in Cambodia with particular sensitivity, wondering at the specter of death that still hovers over the landscape. And it is in Vietnam, with its palpable Is there anything more heartbreaking than drowning in sight of land?” asks our narrator—and we know the answer. An elegant meditation on life, death and the ways of the sea. 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." We live in a shortsighted era ourselves, with fascist world leaders who deny science and rely on fear of the other to hold on to power. For me, it's not enough to point out the sins of society, but to look for solutions. Jensen, through the voice of Albert, and through the collective "We" of the novel, does just that. Without glossing over the hardships and the injustice surrounding us, he looks to the past to find strength for the struggles of the future.

That the middle section of We, the Drowned is slow is not solely a function of Jensen suddenly losing his talent mid-book. Mostly, it’s the result of the varying settings: the thrall of the wide blue ocean verses the sedateness of a provincial Danish village. All this is to say, I suppose, that We, the Drowned is wildly inconsistent in tone and quality. But it is also wildly ambitious and consistently entertaining. Even those sections on dry land (about which I have griped at length) have pleasures to offer the reader. Messiness in an epic novel is not as fatal a flaw as it would be in a slim work of literary fiction. To the contrary, messiness can be endearing. Here, Jensen starts with a small town, but everything else is big: big characters, battles, storms, adventures. A big ocean upon which all these things play out. We, the Drowned is proudly overstuffed. By the end of the novel, this overstuffed quality has become its crowning virtue. All the accumulated details combine for an effective emotional punch in the solar plexus. There is a touch of magical realism woven into the book. This makes it a piece of art, of imagination. It frees the reader from the restrictions of logic and reason. Through the addition of magical realism the events don't have to conform to reality, which is something I usually want, but I don’t need it here, not in this book. The magic is cleverly woven into the story. It serves a purpose. It leaves a message. 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."I haven’t read the Danish version of We, the Drowned for the fundamental reason I don’t speak Danish. (I do have three and a half years of high school German, though! Ich mochte ein bier, bitte!) Accordingly, I cannot speak to the faithfulness of the translation. I can say, however, that I had no trouble reading it. We, the Drowned has been transformed into direct, plainspoken English, with few flourishes. The only problem I had on this point was the book’s tendency towards lazy idioms and shopworn clichés. I cannot say, however, whether the fault lies with the translators or the author. 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."

The book was also a great history lesson. I love maritime history; I have shelves of maritime history books in my home library. I learned a lot about the pains and tribulations of the sailors, which are often left out of historical texts. I learned more than I probably cared to about WWII. The WWII sections were brilliant, and terrible. There is no foreknowledge of ships necessary to understand this book, but even if you know a bit, you’ll probably learn something. Although Jensen also includes first-person and third-person omniscient sections, his predominant use of the first-person plural is particularly clever because the identity of the narrating group shifts as the story progresses: first it is Marstallers generally, then it is schoolboy peers, later it’s the widows left behind on the island. Como marcara previamente, Laurids Madsen uno de los tres personajes principales. Los otros dos son Albert Madsen, su hijo y Knud Erik Friis, un niño al que Albert adopta como propio y que continuará la saga de estas historias hasta su adultez, culminándola 96 años después de Laurdis, durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial en 1945.

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This early uncertainty is compounded by Jensen’s choice of narrative viewpoint; or, more specifically, his refusal to settle on one narrative viewpoint. The point-of-view in We, the Drowned is always shifting. At times during the novel, Jensen utilizes a standard, third-person omniscient viewpoint. For one section, he switches to the first person singular. The bulk of the story, however, is told in the rarer first-person collective, using the pronoun “we.” The atmosphere of the histories is composed in a (slightly) dark mood- mostly because of the insights provided to the depths of the different personages (not to mention the depths of the sea which is always present as an environment where everything happens, as a leading force of life, of the narration and the foundation of the overall book spirit, as could be presupposed). Those personages often carry different dimensions of brokenness which often tends to be manifested through their actions in the course of the story/-ies. It is all in the lines. Some are beautiful, and yet their beauty is not the main thing. It is that each line had me thinking. Something happens, a person does something and then a line expresses the dilemma a person now faces. This is what made the book for me. Life is complicated, people are complicated and I like books that show you this. I felt that over and over again, in every paragraph, I was drawn into a character’s search for understanding. War, nature, friendship, love - all pull you in more than one direction. Look at the sea. Look at the havoc and destruction of a storm there. Flip the coin and look at the beauty it holds. Even during war there can bee kindness and goodness. Love can rip you apart. Am I comprehensible?

Puedo asegurar sin equivocarme que si Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson y Joseph Conrad hubieron podido leer esta imponente novela de Carsten Jensen, la hubieran disfrutado enormemente, ya que este escritor danés es un más que digno sucesor de estos tres autores que hicieron del mar y de su experiencia real en él su mejor ficción. La historia comienza en el año 1849 contando lo que le pasa a uno de los tres personajes claves en los que Jensen basa todo el libro, el marino Laurids Madsen y en donde el autor nos mete de lleno en un verdadero infierno, como lo es la guerra y que en este caso se se desarrolla en el mar y a un punto tal que las descripciones de este inicio verdaderamente escalofriante me hicieron recordar a los primeros veinticinco minutos de la película "Buscando al soldado Ryan". El nivel de crudeza es altísimo. The sea was ever-changing, and yet it left him with an impression of sameness. In the autumn he saw it congeal beneath low-hanging layers of stratocumulus cloud. The water moved sluggishly, like liquid mercury. The temperature fell, and when winter announced itself, he saw his own life reflected in the slowly freezing surface of the water. 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.

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Carsten Jensen is unquestionably one of the most exciting authors writing in Scandinavia today. I always look forward hugely to his books. He is, in my opinion, an utterly unique story-teller Henning Mankell 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. Lisa Hannigan’s spellbinding live album in collaboration with Andre de Ridder’s contemporary-classical s t a r g a z e orchestra is out now via Play It Again Sam. To celebrate, the Irish singer-songwriter is sharing a new video of her and s t a r g a z e playing the emphatic, hauntingly-beautiful ‘ We The Drowned’ at Dublin’s National Concert Hall on the night the LP was recorded. You can watch the video for ‘ We The Drowned’ below.

Chris Stewart, Commercial Director at Banijay Rights, said: “We’re very pleased to be partnered with MARLOWFILM Productions on this exciting new drama from Mikael Salomon, one of the industry’s most renowned and respected directors. We, The Drowned is the perfect example of a local story with a truly global appeal, focusing on timeless and universal themes of adventure, love, desire, grief and the passage of time, which we know will strike a chord with international audiences.” LATER NOTE: I was just reflecting on the "we", perhaps that "We, the Drowned" and it is they, the missing from Marstal, those unable to participate anymore, are telling the story at times.A fiercely romantic novel that spans over 100 years of Danish history of war and love... Large in size, but even larger in scope because of its storytelling and writing. Berlingske Tidende, Denmark