We, The Drowned

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Overall, there were plenty of good moments and thoughts which I really liked and was trying to share on the way of my reading.

It was that romance that led me to take a flyer on Carsten Jensen’s We, the Drowned, which spans nearly a century in the life of the Danish port town of Marstal. What do you say about a book that, after you finished it, you sat staring at a wall for fifteen minutes while tears flowed down your cheeks? It’s miraculous. I don’t feel that that’s enough, this review isn’t enough. I loved this book, I cannot do it justice. Still, it’s a good challenge to force yourself to examine what made you love a book, so here we go: El sólo hecho de leer en su contratapa que fue ganador del premio literario más prestigioso de su país, Dinamarca y que fue elegido como la mejor novela de los últimos veinticinco años, me daba la sensación del porte y la excelencia que esta novela traía en sus páginas. I was swept away (pun noted but not intended) by this wonderful book. I didn't want it to end and thankfully, given its length, it didn't do so for some considerable time. It was voted the greatest Danish book of the last 25 years. I have no idea what sort of competition it was up against but its victory doesn't surprise me: it is one of the best books I have read in the past 25 years as well. Me and My Big Mouth Live In Dublin by Lisa Hannigan and s t a r g a z e is out now on digital platforms, vinyl and CD via PIay It Again Sam.explains, in part, the novel's unattractive title, We, the Drowned. Told neither from an omniscient Olympian point of Uma épica aventura marítima que se inicia em 1848 e termina no final de Segunda Guerra Mundial em 1945. The cannonball had come crashing through the roof of their house in Korsgade during the English siege of Marstal in 1808, and it had put Laurids’s mother in such a fright that she promptly gave birth to him right in the middle of the kitchen floor. When little Albert wasn’t busy with the cannonball it lived in the kitchen, where Karoline used it as a mortar for crushing mustard seeds. “It could have been you announcing your arrival, my boy,” Laurids’s father had once said to him, “seeing how big you were when you were born. If the stork had dropped you, you would have gone through the roof like an English cannonball.”

A solid, marvelously written narrative…The careful language, the ability to dig into the human psyche, the finely-tuned portraits of characters and the landscape of Peru in the earlier twentieth century, with is social upheaval, strikes, brothels, the rubber industry (the reader might be reminded of The Dream of the Celt by Mario Vargas Llosa), plus the story’s literary web, all wisely employed, turn The Sky over Lima into a novel to be read with supreme pleasure until it’s been completely devoured.” — Estado Crítico So had many others. But he was the only one to return to Marstal with the peculiar notion that everything there was too small, and to prove his point, he frequently spoke in a foreign tongue he called American, which he’d learned when he sailed with the naval frigate Neversink for a year. It's the kind of book in which things just happen. The town grows. The violence that seems so ingrained stops. A poor person appears, and she's obviously poor because she's described as being part of a culture of poverty even though none of the other townsfolk seem materially any different from her. I could navigate from a chart; I could determine my position using a sextant. I was in an unknown place in the Pacific on a ship with no captain and I could still find my way. But I had no way of mapping my own mind or the course of my life.” They thrash you on board ship too. It never ends. It goes on and on. You might as well get used to it now."

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Appealingly, none of the three male protagonists are victims of the traditional soldier stereotypes—living only through their military exploits. Their adventures on the South Seas and their efforts in the face of Nazism do not supersede the richness and depth of their characters. Neither Albert nor Knud relish the violence in which they take part, and all three morally and emotionally suffer in the aftermath of their duties. We, the Drowned is, more than anything, a grand mythology of violence—a genrationalsagain more than familial matters. Violence (and victimization) are engrained aspects of masculinity for Marstalers, but not aspects that should betaken lightly or emotionally elided.Jensen’s battles evoke awe and repulsion: the book re-sensitizes us to such horrors.