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A review by julesjoulesjewels
We, the Drowned by Carsten Jensen
2.0
Well, I'm glad that's over.
This book passes the Bechdel test by the skin of its teeth, but don't let that fool you; throughout, it is absolutely abominable to women while being extremely forgiving of the men who abuse them. There isn't a single woman in this novel's 674 pages that doesn't exist to serve a male plot -- that doesn't exist to be either his savior or his destroyer. That alone I could have handled; it's not great, but it's unfortunately pretty common fare in the stories we tell. But when I am asked to sympathize with men who simply "can't control" themselves around women, when I am asked to sympathize with a man who takes advantage of a woman less than half his age or with a man who rapes a woman after murdering her lover because he believes she is "his" now, when I am asked to sympathize with men like these while the woman who seeks to ruin their way of life is designated "inhuman"? I cannot believe this book was written in the last decade, much less the last century.
I think what annoys me the most about this book is that I wanted to love it so badly. There are moments when it is truly beautiful, especially in the first half, and it holds, at times, the promise of being great. But I can only read so many disgusting sentences that treat women as creatures or things before I start to wonder what a book is really about. Beyond its gross misunderstanding of women and its blunt insistence that a life at sea is a hard one where men drown and drown and drown, this book didn't seem to know.
This book passes the Bechdel test by the skin of its teeth, but don't let that fool you; throughout, it is absolutely abominable to women while being extremely forgiving of the men who abuse them. There isn't a single woman in this novel's 674 pages that doesn't exist to serve a male plot -- that doesn't exist to be either his savior or his destroyer. That alone I could have handled; it's not great, but it's unfortunately pretty common fare in the stories we tell. But when I am asked to sympathize with men who simply "can't control" themselves around women, when I am asked to sympathize with a man who takes advantage of a woman less than half his age or with a man who rapes a woman after murdering her lover because he believes she is "his" now, when I am asked to sympathize with men like these while the woman who seeks to ruin their way of life is designated "inhuman"? I cannot believe this book was written in the last decade, much less the last century.
I think what annoys me the most about this book is that I wanted to love it so badly. There are moments when it is truly beautiful, especially in the first half, and it holds, at times, the promise of being great. But I can only read so many disgusting sentences that treat women as creatures or things before I start to wonder what a book is really about. Beyond its gross misunderstanding of women and its blunt insistence that a life at sea is a hard one where men drown and drown and drown, this book didn't seem to know.