We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen
or...One Hundred Years of Sailortude - In which Scandanavian fiction takes sail on a fair wind from South America.
This is a strange and ambitious book - mixing history: economical, political, social and technological; with fabulous adventures on the high seas and moments of high comedy. My sense is that it would have more meaning for someone with a greater knowledge of Danish history (during two summers working in Copenhagen all I learnt was to understand people ordering pizzas in Dansk). It is a history of the town of Marstal and a number of it's inhabitants, a town dominated by the neighbouring sea, a town often left to women, children and old men as the men took to the high seas, often to be gone for years.
