From Michael Dirda's "LIBRARY WITHOUT WALLS" column on The Barnes & Noble Review
It's tempting to call this immense and
immensely engrossing novel a Danish One
Hundred Years of Solitude. Covering a century in the life
of the shipping and trading town of Marstal, We, the Drowned certainly contains a number of
magic realist moments, starting with its first sentence: "Many years ago
there lived a man called Laurids Madsen, who went up to Heaven and came down
again, thanks to his boots." In subsequent pages a charismatically amoral
villain uses pearls as bullets, we learn the destiny of the shrunken head of
Captain James Cook, people are nearly smothered to death by swarms of butterflies,
a snowman turns out to be a corpse covered in ice, a wealthy shipbroker's
dreams reveal the deaths awaiting his townspeople, an obsessed woman decides to
punish the sea, and in a moment of reckless courage, a despondent ship captain
dives into the North Atlantic to rescue a torpedoed vessel's single
survivor -- who turns out to be his long-lost love.
Yet Carsten Jensen's book is too good to be reductively relabeled One Hundred Years of Sailoring. First of all, Marstal isn't Macondo; it's a real Danish port, and the novel adapts actual events from the city's history. Second, Jensen's book more properly belongs to the classic European tradition of the multi-generational historical novel: at times it calls to mind Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks, at others it reads like a tightly packed one-volume condensation of Emile Zola's Rougon-Macquart cycle.
While the
narrative thread focuses on the sailors Laurids Madsen, his son Albert, and
Albert's adopted son Knud Erik, the book is also something of an anthology of set
pieces: individual chapters depict brutalized childhoods, there's a Somerset
Maugham-style tale of the South Pacific and a Jack Londonish short story about
a murderous first mate; several sections reveal the loneliness and suffering of
the wives left behind in Marstal; and there are extended accounts of the
horrors of battle at sea, from the early 19th century through World
War II. Very seldom does any individual's story end quite as he, she, or the
reader expected: instead, life just goes on.
That
explains, in part, the novel's unattractive title, We, the Drowned. Told neither from an omniscient Olympian point of
view nor in a memoirist's first person singular voice, the book is narrated by
a collective "we." In effect, the story is related by a chorus, like
those in ancient tragedy, and one that not only sets down events but also
comments on their implications. By the end of the novel, however, that "we"
has grown to encompass more than the group memory of the Danish port city of
Marstal. We, the Drowned points to
the ultimate fate that awaits us all on life's voyage. As Jensen succinctly
puts it:
You
could learn about clouds, wind direction, and currents, but the sea remained
forever unpredictable. All you could do was adapt to it and try to return home
alive.
As you
might already suspect, the novel's vision of life is hardly cheerful -- good
people die, evil is sometimes punished and sometimes not, the past poisons the
present, and even innocent pets come to grotesque ends. Jensen is clearly kin
to such melancholy Danes as Hamlet and Kierkegaard. Death haunts these often
doleful pages:
The
merciful comfort of a grave to which you can take your children and tell them
about their father in front of the headstone that bears his name, the
possibility of distracting yourself by clearing weeds or perhaps disappearing
into a whispered conversation with the man who lies underground -- a sailor's
widow is denied all that. Instead she receives an official document declaring
that the ship her husband was working on, or perhaps skippered and owned, has
been 'lost with all hands,' gone down on this or that date, in this or that
place, often at a depth beyond salvaging, with fish the only witnesses. And she
can put that piece of paper away in a drawer of the bureau. Such are the
funeral rites awarded to the drowned.
At best,
cold comfort is allowed the bereaved of Marstal, that which arises from
clear-eyed understanding: "The captain's message was simple: this is the
way things are. He taught us a vast, all-embracing acceptance, which allowed
life's realities to come at us directly. The sea takes us, but it has no
message to convey when its waters close over our heads and fill our lungs. It
may seem like strange consolation, but Albert's words offered us a foothold:
things had always been this way, and these were conditions we all shared."
At first We, the Drowned seems almost plotless,
but gradually patterns, leitmotifs, and symbolic objects (the magical sea
boots, James Cook's shrunken head) begin to recur, so that the book emerges as
an exploration of what one might call life's connectedness. Jensen clearly
relishes the strange conjunctions of time and chance. His book is full of
coincidence, undeserved luck and unexpected misfortune. Laurids Marsden
disappears, and his son Albert roams the earth searching for him. A generation
grows up and dies, as a new generation is born with the same dreams of life and
adventure. We are linked, moreover, not just by blood or affection but also "through
the hurt we inflict on one another." Wars erupt and destroy lives and
families -- again and again. People fall in love and usually things don't work
out. While his betters die young, the most hateful character in the novel
survives, and his survival turns out to be a kind of blessing. One simply never
knows. When a civic-minded shipowner erects a town monument -- emblazoned "Strength
in Fellowship" -- he lives to see the hollowness of its words.
Life is
gray and hard in Marstal. As one bitter woman says: "You call Marstal a
sailor's town, but do you know what I call it? I call it a town of wives. It's
the women who live here. The men are just visiting." Even lovemaking is
seldom joyous, usually being marked by violence or likened to drowning, two people
dragging each other down into the depths. The town preacher actually shrinks
from the grief of his parishioners. One group of children, tormented by a
sadistic schoolmaster named Isager, is mystified by a supposedly admirable Old
Testament figure:
"We
knew all about Jacob: we'd paid attention. We knew that he was an impostor who
stole from his own brother, the hairy-armed Esau, and lied to his father, the
blind Isaac, and sired children by four different women, Rachel, Leah, Bilhah
and Zilpah, and that when one proved barren, he would simply move on to the
next, and that he had a fight with an angel that left him with a limp, but that
later he was blessed by God. It was a peculiar story, but none of us dared
point out its oddness to Isager."
Despite its Baltic gloom and occasional longueurs, We, the Drowned markedly possesses the one essential narrative quality, what adventure novelist Rider Haggard called grip. Jensen can tell a story, and even in translation -- what seems to me a very fine translation -- the novel seizes hold of the reader and doesn't let go. Along with tales of war, coming of age, life at sea, and sudden death, the book presents three very different and moving love stories against the changeover from sail to steam to diesel engines.
Still,
one misses some lightness and laughter. After all, there's more to existence
than disappointment and suffering. Or is there? When the pain or desperation is
too great, Jensen's characters simply ship out or run away or start drinking
and whoring. Wryness is the book's substitute for humor: "Without
discussing it with his mother, Anton went up to his teacher, Miss Katballe, and
informed her that after seven years he was now quitting school. It was the best
day of her life, she replied. With unexpected politeness he bowed, thanked her,
and said, likewise."
Why
should you give this fine, if hardly sunny, novel a try? Joseph Conrad once
said that a man who is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the
sea. Jensen shows us the dreams of dozens of people, and what those dreams lead
to. His final chapter, "The End of the World," is as shocking and
thrilling a short novel about men at sea during World War II as any you will
ever read. Still, the loneliness in Jensen's book, as well as its savagery and stoic,
even heroic attitude toward life, may not be to everyone's taste. Like Sam
Peckinpah's film "The Wild Bunch" or Cormac McCarthy's epic Blood Meridian, these pages never flinch from
anything. This is how things are. Carsten Jensen's international bestseller isn't
just a book about Danish sailors, it's a novel about what one must call -- and
forgive the grandiose phrase -- the sorrowful human condition. To those with eyes
to see, we are all, as the poet Stevie Smith observed, "not waving but
drowning."
A bestselling Danish novel, by journalist and foreign correspondent Jensen, that chronicles the long-suffering inhabitants of a port city over the course of a century.
Call him Laurids, one of the two kinds of people who populate Jensen's Homeric catalogue: the drowned and the saved, the latter of whom usually wind up drowned anyway. Laurids Madsden "went up to Heaven and came down again, thanks to his boots," as Jensen whimsically writes—though, he adds, Laurids never got farther north than the top of his main mast before death spat him back out. Laurids is a veteran of wars and long circumnavigations of the globe, and, now a captain in middle age, childless and unmarried, he faces the difficult task of figuring out how to move about on the dry land of his home. Says one of his neighbors, "You call Marstal a sailors' town, but do you know what I call it? I call it a town of wives. It's the women who live here. The men are just visiting."Those women, Jensen's omniscient narrator tells us, "live in a state of permanent uncertainty," for those men are in the habit of disappearing for two or three years at a time and battling very long odds of survival, to say nothing of heavily armed Germans. Hope is either a greening plant or an open wound, the narrator adds, and so the people of Marstal go about their business not quite knowing who among them is living or dead. Jensen (I Have Seen the World Begin: Travels Through China, Cambodia, and Vietnam, 2002, etc.) peoples his long, expertly told saga with figures from Danish history as well as of his own invention, from Crown Prince Frederik to a ship's captain who "remained equally pale in summer and winter, in northern hemisphere and southern," and all with the usual frailties and foibles. Jensen is a sympathetic storyteller with an eye for the absurd, with the result that if this novel descends fromMoby-Dick, it also looks toThe Tin Drumfor inspiration.
"Is there anything more heartbreaking than drowning in sight of land?" asks our narrator—and we know the answer. An elegant meditation on life, death and the ways of the sea.
