It’s about a fight with God. The book covers roughly 200 years of history, and the sea is the only constant character, a godlike being, who is more of a God to the sailors upon her than God could ever be. No one feels like God condemns them to death, but the depths and ice reach out, and grab the sailors one by one, leaving families in Marstal to grieve over a missing body. The sea has power over every aspect of their lives and they are enthralled to it. We live in a shortsighted era ourselves, with fascist world leaders who deny science and rely on fear of the other to hold on to power. For me, it's not enough to point out the sins of society, but to look for solutions. Jensen, through the voice of Albert, and through the collective "We" of the novel, does just that. Without glossing over the hardships and the injustice surrounding us, he looks to the past to find strength for the struggles of the future. Heave away, my jolly boys! Heave away, my bullies!” Laurids shouted in encouragement, as he watched his youngest son struggling with it.

The word 'freedom' was something the world had taught me recently and I'd had to sail far to grasp its meaning. In Hobart Town I heard that word from men who chained themselves to their own greed. Freedom had a thousand faces. But so did crime. The thought of what a man might do made me dizzy. What do you say about a book that, after you finished it, you sat staring at a wall for fifteen minutes while tears flowed down your cheeks? It’s miraculous. I don’t feel that that’s enough, this review isn’t enough. I loved this book, I cannot do it justice. Still, it’s a good challenge to force yourself to examine what made you love a book, so here we go: Jensen bravely elected to narrate We, the Drowned in the first-person plural, and the power of his novel is owed also to this ambiguous but omniscient narrator.The first-person plural is a rarely usednarrative voice (it found success in Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides and Joshua Ferris’s And Then We Came to the End, and perhaps most famously, in Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily), but never has it had such pointedly haunting effect.Jensen’s narrators alternately, but never definitively, reflect the points-of-view of the townspeople of Marstal: sailors, wives, old curmudgeons, young children.His “we” is rather like the chorus of Greek tragedy—homogeneous and boundless, sometimes judging and always interpreting. The “we” of We, the Drowned is a haunting voice—a whole society, in unison, made manifest. Todos los marinos que desfilan por las páginas de este libro aseguran que decidieron elegir esa vida tan azarosa y sacrificada, pero se equivocan.Carsten Jensen is unquestionably one of the most exciting authors writing in Scandinavia today. I always look forward hugely to his books. He is, in my opinion, an utterly unique story-teller Henning Mankell

There is a touch of magical realism woven into the book. This makes it a piece of art, of imagination. It frees the reader from the restrictions of logic and reason. Through the addition of magical realism the events don't have to conform to reality, which is something I usually want, but I don’t need it here, not in this book. The magic is cleverly woven into the story. It serves a purpose. It leaves a message. his reason for having 230 men drag a fourteen-ton boulder around on a flatbed. Why now, why in the year 1913?

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Lo que verdaderamente persiste en la memoria del lector son estos personajes maravillosos que nos regaló Carsten Jensen, en sus vidas y sus aventuras, en esos barcos a vela, a vapor y de guerra y por supuesto en el mar, ese eterno dios. The advantage to this point-of-view is that it gives you intimacy (you are made part of the unfolding story) without sacrificing scope (unlike the first person, singular, you see things through many eyes). The problem, though, especially at the start, is that you aren’t quite sure who the protagonist is supposed to be, much less the identity of the authoritatively-voiced “we.” Moreover, Jensen uses this time to introduce female characters into the heretofore all-male world of sailors. Indeed, one of Jensen’s main themes is the odd life-cycle in the town of Marstal. The men go down to the sea on ships, leaving the women and children behind. The men drown; the boys grow up and follow their fathers and drown; and the graveyards of Marstal are filled with old women. Klara, who has been made bitter by the loss of her husband and the pull of the sea, gives voice to this theme. At a time when all things Scandinavian are in vogue, I can’t see why this glorious epic shouldn’t take the world by storm. Impressive... one of the more engrossing literary voyages of recent years... rich, powerful and rewarding Financial Times