De todas maneras, todo aquello que Herman Melville nos cuenta en sus novelas acerca de la vida del hombre de mar, Jensen lo plantea a modo de interrogante y con esto deja latente la necesidad en el lector acerca del devenir de la historia, ya que todos los sucesos están encadenados entre sí. That the middle section of We, the Drowned is slow is not solely a function of Jensen suddenly losing his talent mid-book. Mostly, it’s the result of the varying settings: the thrall of the wide blue ocean verses the sedateness of a provincial Danish village. This early uncertainty is compounded by Jensen’s choice of narrative viewpoint; or, more specifically, his refusal to settle on one narrative viewpoint. The point-of-view in We, the Drowned is always shifting. At times during the novel, Jensen utilizes a standard, third-person omniscient viewpoint. For one section, he switches to the first person singular. The bulk of the story, however, is told in the rarer first-person collective, using the pronoun “we.”

Sailors were neither better nor worse than other people. It was the situation they found themselves in that encouraged loyalty. In the finite world of the ship, mutual dependency overrode individual survival instinct. Every man knew he'd never make it alone. We, the drowned” begins with a departure and a war. The departure is to Heaven, where you can see only Saint Peter’s ass obviously, and the war... well, it is waged against an opponent you know you can’t defeat, but it’s woven into human nature to never give up. Even when the biggest wave has whelmed you and your lungs are burning for a breath of air. Especially then. The novel is a collection of stories. Just as our own life is never completely detached, the characters pass the story as a ball, and the events gradually threaded into a string of pearls that has neither beginning nor end. The pearls are gathered from the four corners of the world, but what they have in common is that they were born from the ocean. And those who have hunted for them know that one day they might also end up at the bottom of the ocean. Some connections, though bitter, are stronger than the self-preservation instinct. So you learn to shed sadness as unnecessary skin and keep moving forward. And tell stories. Salty like tears and sea. Occasionally the story was told from one characters perspective, but more often it was written in the very rare first-person collective, “we.” I loved this. It made the story so involving. Who was we? It was all of us. The story is often hard to read. Its dark, and it reaches for your heart, but at times there are moments of such humor, such dark humor, that I burst out laughing. Then you really feel like you are joining in the sorrows and joys of everyone else in the town.

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Puedo asegurar sin equivocarme que si Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson y Joseph Conrad hubieron podido leer esta imponente novela de Carsten Jensen, la hubieran disfrutado enormemente, ya que este escritor danés es un más que digno sucesor de estos tres autores que hicieron del mar y de su experiencia real en él su mejor ficción. Albert Madsen will eventually perish, with tears in his eyes about the senseless loss of life and the wholesale destruction of a world war. But the dance of generations will continue with his adoptive son Knud Erik, who hears the call of the far horizons in his turn, and who will be caught in his turn in a global conflagration. I am not going to do a recap of his adventures, except to note the continuous use of the second person narrative, the 'We' that makes Marstallers so strong in the face of adversity. The audiobook narration by Simon Vance is absolutely stellar. You never think about it; it flows so smoothly. It is read slowly when it should be read slowly and fast when it should be read fast. It is read with pretty good Danish pronunciation. I only know Swedish, but it sounded right. To my ears the name Knud, sounded occasionally like Knuth, just a minor blemish though.

This long and solid first novel tells an epic multi-generational story of the maritime community of Marstal, Denmark, beginning in the mid-19th century, with Laurids Madsen, a sailor conscripted into the makeshift Danish navy during the country's war with Germany. After the war, Laurids signs on to a ship and sails off, never to be seen or heard from again. Enter his son, Albert, who sails the oceans in search of his father and undergoes many harrowing and strange experiences before returning to Marstal a wealthy man. Albert befriends a young widow and tries to provide companionship for her son Knud Erik but is later drawn into a complicated and tragic relationship with the boy's mother. Albert dies, which turns the story over to Knud Erik as he, too, goes to sea, over his mother's objections. She has inherited Albert's wealth and has made it her mission to end the town's tragic relationship to the sea, which leaves many men dead and makes many women widows. VERDICT Starting off slowly, Jensen's novel builds momentum and becomes quite thrilling and engaging on many levels, from adventures on the high seas to devastating personal dramas in a small community at the mercy of the forces of nature and history. It may not appeal to a large audience, but it won't disappoint those willing to make the effort.—Jim Coan, SUNY at Oneonta Lib. Library Journal The sea was ever-changing, and yet it left him with an impression of sameness. <…> The cloud above the frozen sea changed, but he was already familiar with them all. There was plenty for the eye to feast on, but nothing for the soul.” The savages have no concept of freedom. They're free, but they don't know it. So before they can learn to value their freedom, they must first lose it. The sea was ever-changing, and yet it left him with an impression of sameness. In the autumn he saw it congeal beneath low-hanging layers of stratocumulus cloud. The water moved sluggishly, like liquid mercury. The temperature fell, and when winter announced itself, he saw his own life reflected in the slowly freezing surface of the water. it wasn't about obeying or disobeying rules. Life had taught him about something far more complicated than justice. Its name was balance.Todo tiene un balance, una porción de tragedia y otra de sonrisas (que son pocas), pero en líneas generales el dramatismo sostiene gran parte de cada una de las historias que vamos conociendo a medida que atravesamos las distintas generaciones de estos intrépidos hombres de mar. The audiobook narration by Simon Vance is absolutely stellar. You never think about it; it flows so smoothly. It is read slowly when it should be read slowly Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize. LATER NOTE: I was just reflecting on the "we", perhaps that "We, the Drowned" and it is they, the missing from Marstal, those unable to participate anymore, are telling the story at times.

In the original Danish, Vi de druknede has already won the Danske Banks Litteraturpris, Demark's equivalent of the Man Booker. Now it has been unleashed on the English-speaking world, many more accolades will surely follow Roger Cox, The ScotsmanCarsten Jensen took the seafaring history of small Danish port and made of it a mighty ocean-going vessel of stories about a whole world in motion. Boyd Tonkin, Independent, Christmas round up I spent five days utterly submerged in this magnificent Danish seafaring epic. From the first line onwards, it is an enthralling combination of history and legend: “Many years ago there lived a man called Laurids Madsen, who went up to heaven and came down again thanks to his boots.” En el medio conoceremos a muchísimos personajes más, desde la época de escuela Albert Madsen, donde nos encontramos que la enseñanza danesa era múcho más brutal que la enseñanza inglesa a cargo del temible maestro Isager, hasta que se siguen narrando las distintas aventuras arriba de los barcos. Ha sido un viaje maravilloso que abarca casi cien años de marinos, de hombres de mar, de generaciones de estos héroes que todo lo arriesgaban entre las olas más peligrosas, la guerra y el frío extremo. Un verdadero paseo por las aguas de todos los océanos y en los barcos más disímiles posibles. All this is to say, I suppose, that We, the Drowned is wildly inconsistent in tone and quality. But it is also wildly ambitious and consistently entertaining. Even those sections on dry land (about which I have griped at length) have pleasures to offer the reader. Messiness in an epic novel is not as fatal a flaw as it would be in a slim work of literary fiction. To the contrary, messiness can be endearing. Here, Jensen starts with a small town, but everything else is big: big characters, battles, storms, adventures. A big ocean upon which all these things play out. We, the Drowned is proudly overstuffed. By the end of the novel, this overstuffed quality has become its crowning virtue. All the accumulated details combine for an effective emotional punch in the solar plexus.