Carsten Jensen

Travelling the World

Blood, violence and cruel fate are the main motifs of Carsten Jensen’s brilliant history of the Danish sailors of Marstal, Vi de druknede (We, the Drowned), which puts both him and the small Danish town on the map of world literature. It has now sold to 11 different countries, including England and the US.

By Anne Mette Lundtofte. Photo: © Isak Hoffmeyer
 

There’s a lot of violence in Carsten Jensen’s historical novel, ‘We, the Drowned’. Firstly, there’s the sadistic teacher, Isager, who beats his students black and blue, and in the streets there are gangs of children beating up each other. Beatings are also given by seafaring fathers home on leave to punish whatever mischief the boys have been up to in the meantime, just as the fathers themselves have been thrashed – by the mate, by other sailors, by the conditions at sea – while they were gone.

On top of that, the book opens and concludes with a bloody war – from the naval battle against the Germans in 1848 to the end of World War Two in 1945 – and not many uplifting stories are offered en route. For it’s not the history of progress, Jensen is interested in telling here, but another modern narrative – that of the end of civilisation. It’s an end which the book steers toward with the little Danish island town of Marstal as its figurehead.

As Jensen plays with the history of European Enlightenment in ‘We, the Drowned’, he also turns the Danish national consciousness upside-down. He doesn’t depict the Danes like a homey culture of earth-bound farmers, as is usually the case in history books, but as a wild bunch of restless sailors. This new perspective on a small country has in turn made the book popular on the international market, where it has sold to 11 different countries, including England and the US. The book’s English editor, James Gurbutt, attributes this success with the novel’s ability to connect the local history of Marstal with world history through universal and current themes:

"I believe ‘We. The Drowned’ will travel far on the international market, firstly because of its main theme which we can all relate to – I’m thinking of the relationship between fathers and sons in the book, and the sailor as the absent father figure. Secondly, the war theme is of current interest, especially here in England – like Ærø (where Marstal is located), we’re an island and a seafaring nation with a whole history of conquests and catastrophes behind us”. 

Universal themes aside, "We, the Drowned” is also an unusual book, not the least because of the canny formal choice Jensen makes: his decision to write the novel in the first-person plural. The collective "we” in the book are the sailors of Marstal, and even if the women throughout the story try to save their husbands and sons from what they call their "misconceived manhood”, it is the men and this manhood, which the book is about. 

Firstly, it’s about Lauritz Madsen, a sailor who at the beginning of the book is standing on the deck of a ship in naval action, when an explosion suddenly catapults him up in the air. Miraculously, he lands again on both feet on the deck, and afterwards the saying goes that Lauritz saw "the ass of St. Peter”. As it turns out, Lauritz didn’t go to heaven that night of the battle of Eckenförde, but rather he went to hell – and never got back. After the war, Laurids is a changed man, and he soon disappears at sea, leaving his wife and children to their own devices, as so many sailors – drowned or not drowned – have done before him.

Of those children, Albert is the youngest, and he ships out to find his father fourteen years later, in 1862, but returns empty-handed after years on the Pacific Ocean. What he found in Samoa’s heart of darkness – of slave trade, cannibalism and colonialism – was indeed Lauritz Madsen, but the man could no longer be called Albert’s father, just like Albert is no longer his son. After this traumatic discovery, Albert does go back to Marstal but he never returns properly to the conventional forms of life on land, because – as "we” say – the sailor’s process of formation "doesn’t make him wiser, just harder”. For sailors like Albert, there are no safe havens left on land by the end of the 20th century, just a life in eternal exile – a destiny, which will soon be that of all humanity. 

If the sailors of Marstal are rootless and exilic, however, ‘We, the Drowned’ puts them and their little town of Marstal on the map of world literature. At least, this is what the book’s American editor, Drenka Willen at Harcourt, believes and she trusts that it will be Carsten Jensen’s international breakthrough as a fiction writer: "He writes in the tradition of our greatest writers of adventures – Conrad, Stevenson, Melville – and even if his non-fiction travel writings haven’t sold much on this side of the Atlantic Ocean, I believe that this travel novel will fare really well here. It’s a fascinating story, told by a fascinating storyteller”.

Extract

"Lauritz Madsen had been to Heaven and back.  He was not like others who ended up buried in a grave or who went off to sea and never came home.  He’d never been as high up as a crow’s nest, hardly even as high as a yardarm."

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