We said goodbye to our mothers. They’d been around all our lives, but we’d never properly seen them. They’d been bent over washing tubs or cooking pots, their faces red and swollen from heat and steam, holding everything together while our fathers were away at sea, and nodding off every night in the kitchen chair, with a darning needle in hand. It was their endurance and exhaustion we knew, rather than them. And we never asked them for anything because we didn’t want to bother them.

That was how we showed our love. With silence.

…Our mother sticks a knife in our heart when we say goodbye on the wharf. And we stick a knife in hers when we go. And that’s how we’re connected: through the hurt we inflict on one another.

I really didn’t have much choice about buying Danish author Carsten Jensen’s We, the Drowned. I’ve been telling you how much I like sea stories, and this is a sea epic. One quarter of my ancestors were Danes, and this is the story of a small maritime village on a Danish island, not all that far from where my people came from (though mine were farmers, as far as I know. My sailing ancestors were Norwegian. Close enough).

We, the Drowned is a long book, and strange. It starts out in an almost whimsical faction, telling us of Lauritz Madsen of the town of Marstal, who started a war with Germany singlehanded, and was blown up over the mainsail, saw St. Peter’s backside, and landed on his feet back on deck to tell the tale.

But that’s pretty much the end of the whimsy. Author Jensen quickly falls into the fatalistic tone so common in Scandinavian literature. Things get grim, and they stay grim by and large. There are fantastical, magical realism elements to the book, but they mostly follow sailors’ superstitions—visions and omens and objects carrying bad luck.

We follow a series of central characters as the story unfolds across nearly a century, from the 1840s through World War II. First Lauritz Madsen, the man who was blown up to Heaven, then his son Albert, who spends years searching for Lauritz after he disappears. Then Knud Erik, whom Albert mentors, and his mother Klara, who has a secret plan to save the town from itself. The sea is always present. The boys of Marstal dream of the sea, taking it for granted that they’ll probably drown someday. The men come home briefly, once every two or three years, and then return to the ships and the brutal life that is all they know. The women endure.

From time to time the narration lapses into the first person, plural. The author speaks as “we.” The idea is that this is the voice of the community of Marstal. One of the characters places a mystic value on this idea of community, a sort of substitute religion, but he ends up disappointed, so I’m not sure what we’re supposed to make of that. Christianity is not treated disrespectfully, but the author clearly communicates his belief that its teachings are insufficient for people who (like sailors) have seen the real world. All Christianity has to offer is “sugary platitudes.”

The translation by Charlotte Barslund is pretty good; better than many I’ve seen, but not (I think) inspired.

Having finished We, the Drowned, I’m glad I read it, but I didn’t wish it any longer. I recommend it moderately if you’re interested in this sort of thing, but I can’t say I loved the book.