A review by jobatkin
We, the Drowned by Carsten Jensen

3.0

A big book, with a long story spanning around a hundred years, with lots of different, loosely connected characters. I found the narration of it confusing, as it switches between 'we', and first person 'I' and also 'they' voices telling the story, but the stories themselves were great - full of adventure and variety. The book is set in Marstal, a shipping town on the coast of Denmark, and all of the stories are based on the men, women and children of this town as they sail the world and come home again. I found it too long and a bit dragging in parts, but it moved fairly quickly and explored each character in depth. Albert was my favourite, as he tracks his mysterious disappeared father (who rose up to Heaven and came down again, thanks to his boots) across the globe and finds him living as a native in Samoa. Along the way he inherits the shrunken head of Captain James Cook, escapes an island of cannibals, returns home and befriends a young boy and his mother, and has prophetic dreams of the war before dying frozen upright, standing in the same boots as his father. The rest of the story then follows the young boy, Knud Eric, right through WWII with some equally impossible and hair raising adventures. I think the overall tone was a little too depressing for me to really enjoy it, as each character is always grappling with an existential dilemma, but it had depth and variety and great scope, and I learnt more about Scandinavian shipping than I ever knew existed.