Carsten Jensen
The Nordic peoples live in relation to, or as an extension of, their extraordinary mythology: Sagas, Eddas, Viking tales. I knew a Swedish seaman who, as a small child, had bathtub rubber ducks named Hugin and Munin, after the crows that protected the god Odin, in exchange for plucking out one of his eyes. Their everyday conversation will refer to events in Valhalla in the same offhand but reverential way that non-aboriginal Canadians, North Americans in Nordic climes, will speak of hockey (aboriginal Canadians carry their mythic stories closer, very much as do the Nordics).
People of the Scandinavian, Icelandic and Finnish Nörrland also live in relation to the water that surrounds them; canals, rivers, lakes and, above all, the open sea. Danish author Carsten Jensen's extraordinary debut novel, We, the Drowned, a relatively contemporary saga, weaves myth, village life and sea over generations, illuminating the lives of sailors, their families and their loves.
The book's soaring yet anchoring hero is one Laurids Madsen, a large creature, physically and in persona. His myth, which undergirds a tale that stretches from 1845 to 1945, begins: "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 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 a changed man."
Laurids's sea-to-sky-to-sea-to-land-to-sea adventures are told and celebrated by his contemporaries, and retold for 100 years, by his children and grandchildren, and by those who live on the sea, seeing life on land as interstitial. As a sailor once told me, "I enjoy leave, but I can't live on shore."
Jensen, the son of a sailor, has set We, the Drowned in the Danish port city of Marstal, where generations of his own family have lived their lives and shore leaves.
As butch a book as this is, it is also a lyric work that vividly paints the various women of the ports - wives, lovers or themselves ports of love for sale, women encountered by men of the sea - who are loved, raise families, are widowed to war and water, abandoned and abandoning.
The port city of St. John's, Nfld., figures prominently in the 20th century of this story, through the coming-of-age of the young sailor, Knud Erik, and the feisty and tender Marie, who fights him, dares him, loves him and will lose him to the sea.
The translation is, in the main, finely wrought, preserving both the elegiac lyricism and straightforward, sometimes violent energies of the book. I do wish, however, that American translators (or their publishers) were not so anxious about idioms. To have a young Danish sailor, in 1845, refer to "freezing my butt off" bounces this reader out of a believable book. American readers will understand ass, arse or bum. This nervous yankizing is not egregious in We, the Drowned, but isn't needed at all.
That said, Jensen's talent as a storyteller shines through. We, the Drowned is a huge achievement. A first novel, it's such a large book that I hope the author has more to say. Whatever may follow, I am grateful, engaged and moved by what he has said here.
Contributing reviewer Gale Zoë Garnett dedicates this review to Björn Gabrielson, friend and lifelong sailor to whom she planned to give the book. He drowned in October, 2010.