We, The Drowned

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legacy of colonialism and war, that Jensen ultimately loses himself in an extraordinary love affair. One day Marstal will be a good place to grow up in, instead of a place where boys are raised to become fish food, and girls to be their widows. (from Klara Friis, a major character in the story that deserves her own review) 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.”

We, the Drowned sets sail beyond the narrow channels of the seafaring genre and approaches Tolstoy in its evocation of war’s confusion, its power to stun victors and vanquished alike…A gorgeous, unsparing novel.”— Washington PostA revised version of this short review of my favorite work in translation appeared on the National Book Critics Circle blog in September 2018.)

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. 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.

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I will blame Jensen squarely for the bloated middle section I discussed above. There seems to be a definite dichotomy in his writing style. When Jensen is dealing with naval battles or storms or a scene of dialogue between two sailors, his prose is terse, carefully-hewn, and evocative. But when Jensen is on land, his prose often gets soggy, swollen with Hallmark-card corniness and penny-ante philosophizing.