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A review by saralynnburnett
We, the Drowned by Carsten Jensen
4.0
Even though this book is divided into four parts, it really felt like three books in one. The first bit was about Laurids Madsen, ‘the man who took a trip to heaven and saw Saint Peter’s bare ass’ during the First Schleswig War in 1848. His son, Albert, then crisscrosses the globe looking for him after Laurids has gone missing for several years but has failed to turn up on any of the missing ships registers. The first part had a fun feeling to it: shrunken heads, shooting cannibals with stolen pearls after the ammunition has run out, being accosted at sea by a swam of butterflies that were driven off a nearby island during a hurricane, but it lacked the sense of place the second part of the book had. The author wants to take you to Australia, Hawaii, and Somoa, but all you get from each location is smattering of palm trees, grimy bars, and some sun filtering through the cabin window.
The second part of the book focused on Laurids’s son, Albert, and his visions of doom during the First World War. I found this particularly interesting because the only time you as the reader face this war is through his prophetic nightmares. Albert becomes a mentor to a fatherless boy named Knud Erik and tells him tales not only of his travels around the world but of his visions of the future of their home town of Marstal. If this book has a protagonist – this is it: Marstal. The Danish seafaring town really comes alive during Albert’s story and you will find yourself rooting for it and worrying about. There is also a bit of romance in this portion as Albert, even though he is an old man, courts Knud Erik’s young widowed mother, Klara, but this led to a lot of philosophizing about life and death that I probably could have done without.
The story in the last part of the book focuses on Knud Erik, his motley crew of boyhood friends from Marstal, and Klara, who holds they key to Marstal’s doom or success (does she choose to save the town or destroy it? I won’t say here…) as they face the struggles of economic depression and WWII. I quite enjoyed reading about WWII from an entirely different perspective than I have before. Whenever I’ve read about the firebombing of London I rarely thought of the sailors onboard ships in the Thames who were drifting out to sea with the current in order to avoid vibration mines dropped via parachute by the Germans that starting their propellers would trigger.
Overall I really enjoyed reading this book. The sailing bits didn’t live up to Patrick O’Brian or the Horatio Hornblower series but now there will always be a place in my heart for the tiny town of Marstal.
The second part of the book focused on Laurids’s son, Albert, and his visions of doom during the First World War. I found this particularly interesting because the only time you as the reader face this war is through his prophetic nightmares. Albert becomes a mentor to a fatherless boy named Knud Erik and tells him tales not only of his travels around the world but of his visions of the future of their home town of Marstal. If this book has a protagonist – this is it: Marstal. The Danish seafaring town really comes alive during Albert’s story and you will find yourself rooting for it and worrying about. There is also a bit of romance in this portion as Albert, even though he is an old man, courts Knud Erik’s young widowed mother, Klara, but this led to a lot of philosophizing about life and death that I probably could have done without.
The story in the last part of the book focuses on Knud Erik, his motley crew of boyhood friends from Marstal, and Klara, who holds they key to Marstal’s doom or success (does she choose to save the town or destroy it? I won’t say here…) as they face the struggles of economic depression and WWII. I quite enjoyed reading about WWII from an entirely different perspective than I have before. Whenever I’ve read about the firebombing of London I rarely thought of the sailors onboard ships in the Thames who were drifting out to sea with the current in order to avoid vibration mines dropped via parachute by the Germans that starting their propellers would trigger.
Overall I really enjoyed reading this book. The sailing bits didn’t live up to Patrick O’Brian or the Horatio Hornblower series but now there will always be a place in my heart for the tiny town of Marstal.