I’ve had a few days these past weeks where I’ve been kicked out by a fever and a sore throat. When you’re sick you’re not up to much. And when your 8-month daughter is sick too, it’s really no fun at all being sick, if that wasn’t enough.
On the bright side, this gave me some deserved time to finally get into Carsten Jensen’s epic Vi, de druknede (in English, We, the Drowned, appearing later this year). I’ve been looking forward to reading this novel for a long time since it was first published in 2006, and I am thoroughly enjoying it.
It is an epic about the history of a 100 years from 1848-1945, not through the eyes of kings or generals, but from the perspective of the sailor, the adventurer, the flogged, the fugitive, the runaway, the outcast, the drowned (in all kinds of meanings of that word), and the wives and children who were left behind without being asked, all native to Marstal, a Danish port town on the island Ærø. With the obvious exception of the shrunken head of James Cook, which figures prominently in book. The novel leaves one with a few interesting perspectives on things global and local, which is inspiring, not least in the context of the global internet, and in the context of Kaplak.
In a Danish context the novel is not exactly marginal. It received rave reviews and has been extensively marketed by it’s publisher and by booksellers, and has sold well. In this sense, it is an industrial product, mass produced and sold via traditional book selling channels. The book’s IP (i.e. translation and distribution rights etc.) has been sold to more than a handful of other countries.
On the global web, however, the novel is a marginal niche product. It exists at the mercy of search and an exponential growth of information on the web. In this sense it faces precisely the same challenges as a completely unknown novel by a completely unknown author, if it wants to move beyond the local context and use the internet as a marketing or distribution channel. Like many similar products, Vi, de druknede has it’s own website, but to find it one almost has to search for the book’s exact title. At least, one doesn’t find it by searching for the author’s name, which was my first choice, because apparently Carsten Jensen doesn’t have his own website! The first hit is to an architect of the same name, and another to a LinkedIn profile for a CEO with the same name. And Carsten Jensen is even supposedly the most prominent “Carsten Jensen” in a Danish context, which would lead one to think that he had a greater amount of links pointing to information about him and thus a higher Google PageRank. The most authoritative (international) source on Carsten Jensen remains a stub on Wikipedia.
Even if one does manage to find the book’s website, one will find that it is only available in Danish. Apparently the publisher has thought only about using the global internet for targeting the book to a Danish audience, even if the book rights have long since been sold to a number of other countries. This of course just underpins the status of the novel as an industrial product, which seeks to appeal to a national, mainstream audience. An English reader will learn more from this article, which appears as the second hit, when one searches for keywords such as marstal + sailors.
As a niche product, Carsten Jensen’s novel doesn’t fare much better on the web than most niche products, despite local rave reviews and traditional marketing campaigns via conventional channels. It is as less or as much seen, as it has customers who search for it. Making this easier for potential readers has apparently been of very little concern to the publisher, if one takes this superficial analysis at face value.
We, the drowned is an obvious metaphor for all the unanswered queries of the web. When writing this article I had to find out what a “shrunken head” was in English. It is easy when you know it, but how do you show a search engine what you mean? I knew the Danish word, “skrumpehoved”, but finding the English term was pretty tricky. Kaplak doesn’t have any ambitions for creating new or more intelligent ways to search, but we do think the activity of our network will likely help generate more relevant and context-rich web results, which will more likely cover a much much longer tail of niche interests and pursuits, than is the case today.
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