"We'd stopped thinking in terms of victory or defeat," the narrator says. When the survivors are herded off the beach as prisoners of war, Jensen's prose - though occasionally overballasted with earthy Nordic irony - develops a bite and a scabrous, wandering beauty. (And these Marstallers, by the way, are anything but iron.) Jensen's description of the Danish ship-of-the-line Christian the Eighth running aground in Eckernforde Fjord and being knocked to pieces by a German shore battery transcends anything Patrick O'Brian ever wrote about wooden ships and iron men. The story starts in 1848, as Marstal men are drafted onto Danish warships to fight Germany over possession of the disputed province of Schleswig-Holstein. Marstal is Jensen's home town - and home port for this ambitious, restless, Nordic saga. The North Sea boils on the west, the Baltic on the east, and for centuries, Marstal ships - mostly wooden - sailed the seven seas. Interwoven stories play out in seaports all over the world, from Samoa to Newfoundland, but the men and the boys, and most of the women, are Marstallers, citizens of a tiny seafaring town on the Danish island of Aero, on the eastern side of the Jutland peninsula. For many nights, in fact.Ĭarsten Jensen's epic unfolds across nearly 100 years, from 1848 to 1945. When was the last time you relished sitting down with a 678-page Danish novel? " We, the Drowned" might just be too much book to tote to the beach next summer, but it's powerful reading for a long winter's night.
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