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When his twin brother is killed in a car accident, Helmer is obliged to give up university to take over his brother’s role on the small family farm, resigning himself to spending the rest of his days "with his head under a cow." The novel begins thirty years later with Helmer moving his invalid father upstairs out of the way, so that he can redecorate the downstairs, finally making it his own. Then Riet, the woman who had once been engaged to marry Helmer’s twin, appears and asks if her troubled eighteen-year-old son could come live on the farm for a while. Ostensibly a novel about the countryside, The Twin ultimately poses difficult questions about solitude and the possibility of taking life into one’s own hands. It chronicles a way of life that has resisted modernity, a world culturally apart yet laden with familiar longing.… (more)
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Identical twins Helmer and Henk were almost inseparable as children. As time goes on, Helmer plans to leave the
When a tragic accident kills Henk, Helmer regretfully returns home to the farm to take Henk's place. Father and son have a difficult relationship, to say the least.
As the story opens, Helmer is in his mid -fifties, still resentfully carrying on as a farmer and looking after his now bedridden elderly father. Helmer decides to make a few changes, moving his father to an upstairs room as well as doing some redecorating of the house.
The plot, which moves along slowly, picks up when Helmer's dead twin's former fiance , Riet, contacts Helmer for the first time since Henk's death. Riet,now the widow of another man, asks Helmer if she can send her teen-aged son, also named Henk ,to live with Helmer and his father. Apparently young Henk has been struggling emotionally and Riet thinks that Helmer's assistance will be of help to young Henk.
The intrusion and change that young Henk brings to the household shakes up Helmer's plodding and solitary life . Helmer and his father continue to have difficult relationship.
This is a fascinating read, rich with symbolism, reflection and fraught with loneliness. So subtly is the story told that an undercurrent of the plot that had puzzled me finally gelled as I closed the pages of the book.
A memorable read.
4.5 stars.
That’s what the story is about. This is what the story did. Gerbrand Bakker, through powerful storytelling, slyly draws the reader into the lives of these characters living on this rural farm in Holland. Using spare prose, he dragged me along, quite willingly, through a taut psychological narrative, filled with an underlying rage. I truly felt an incredible sense of place where I could feel the winter chill and smell the first signs of spring.
But it’s the wonderful prose that illuminates this sparse novel:
Coming home doesn’t really help. Coming home after you’ve been somewhere very different is always strange. Is that because everything at home is the way you left it? Whereas you yourself have experienced things, no matter how insignificant, and grown older, even if just by a couple of hours? I see the farm through his eyes: a wet building wet surroundings, with bare, dripping trees, frost-burnt grass, meager stalks of kale, empty fields and a light in an upstairs room. Did I turn on the light or did Father manage it by himself?” (Page 156)
A wonderful novel with the bonus at the end of assuring the reader that a long-held belief in future happiness can arrive unexpectedly even late in life. Highly recommended.
Helmer von Wonderen, the narrator of this novel, has worked on his
Helmer receives a letter from his brother's former fiancee Riet, the first contact they have had since his brother's tragic death. She is recently widowed, and asks if her wayward teenage son can work with him on the farm. As he has done his entire life, Helmer reluctantly agrees to take on the boy, but wonders if Riet has a plan for him, as well.
The book primarily revolves around the three male characters Helmer, his father and Herk, and is filled with deep but subtle resentment, loneliness, loss and mourning. It is a simply but beautifully told story, as evidenced by the opening paragraph:
"I've put father upstairs. I had to park him on a chair first to take the bed apart. He sat there like a calf that's just a couple of minutes old, before it's been licked clean: with a directionless, wobbly head and eyes that drift over things."
Highly recommended.
The Twin, set in the Dutch Platteland, is a meditative novel, sparsely but beautifully written. Helmer, middle-aged twin brother of Henk, oversees the family farm, with only his elderly, bedridden father for company. Henk, always the preferred son, died tragically at eighteen years old; and Helmer subsequently stepped into his dead brother’s shoes, but at great personal cost. His relationship with his father, fractured by tragedy, remains fraught with resentment and contradiction. Unexpectedly, Helmer receives a letter from Henk’s former fiancé, Riet. Her motives for reconnecting are not entirely clear, but for the first time since Henk’s death some forty years earlier, change is breathed into Helmer’s life.
Bakker’s gift, I think, is in the spare and deceptively simple prose, which he uses to explore stirring and complex relationships. His language creates such an intimate sense of place, that I could not help but be drawn in:
“Back on the street, I smell the wood fire from the smokehouse. I buy a pound of eel, which the fishmonger rolls up in old newspaper and puts in a plastic bag. Then I carry on along the waterfront. There’s a gallery near the English Corner. The soapstone statues on the shelves along the wall are beautiful, especially to the touch, but I am still thinking of a painting. I head back to the middle of town.” (64)
Highly recommended!
These are the kinds of sentences that fill The Twin: subtle, understated and crackling. This beautifully written novel shines with its character depiction of Helmer, a man who has made no choices in his life other than
However, the impending death of his father leads him to finally and uncomfortably assert his own will by moving the furniture, painting, and throwing out years worth of family relics. With this new and clean space, he finds that the things he can’t get rid of become more prominent. The house’s newly vacated space feels hollow, a reflection of the state of his heart and mind. He’s aware of his emptiness, and it’s illustrated when he buys a map to hang as “art” for his walls. The lack of anything attractive on the walls of his house makes the single picture lost and the emptiness all the more obvious. All he can do is look at the map and memorize the places he’d like to someday visit, an urge that seems impossible with all the burdens laid upon him since his teens.
He spends his days managing the meager farm, tending carelessly to his father and reeling from the thirty year loss of his twin brother Henk. For a time he allows a wayward teen to help as a farmhand, bringing new dynamics to his empty space. The complexity of the novel isn’t simply the missing twin, that sort of story has been written countless times before. Rather, the theme is based on identity of self, not in relation to anyone else (his father or brother) but in the form of his own destiny. He appears to make no strides towards the independence he aspires to, and the contrast between his thoughts and actions creates a tension that is sometimes funny and sometimes brutal. Self-determination is an entirely unknown concept to Helmer, and throughout the novel you question if he ever can achieve it. Some could read a geo-political message in this, but I’d rather leave that out and focus on the beautiful writing and the descriptions that make you pause: in reference to an old log, “even a dead thing can be beautiful.”
A symbolism that is repeated throughout the novel is of a solitary hooded crow that stalks Helmer through the windows and around the yard, silently glaring. Since crows generally represent sadness or death, I thought it was appropriate in many ways. Yet the way Bakker concludes the story, and accounts for the crow's presence, was still an unexpected surprise.
The book place is not Frisia indeed, but the countryside near Amsterdam, and Bakker is quite understandably tired of thinking of garden plants so he hardly ever mentions any member of the vegetable kingdom. To my surprise and delight, he does mention a lot of birds, I strongly suspect him to be a fellow bird-watcher, but these are only minor details. More importantly, this is a beautifully written book with a subtly universal story.
Superficially it tells the story of a man called Helmer, who is a farmer. He is middle-aged and has lived a very boring life, very different than the one he would have chosen to live had he had a choice. He is taking care of his father's property and literally waiting for the old man to die. Helmer had an identical twin who died when he was a young man, hence the title of the book.
Under the surface, however, it is a story about that universal experience of coming of age and growing to become full human beings that we all must face, which is the instance (or the many such instances we will go through in our lives) when we will choose (or be forced) to become what we wish to (must) become instead of the son/daughter our parents wanted or dreamed us to be, much to their chagrin, but quite often also to our own. This is a subtle and painful point that Bakker catches so well. Helmer's twin was the perfect son is father loved and for whom he had great expectations. Helmer himself oscillates between resentment and love of his brother, often himself thinking of his brother as a better version of himself. However the twin dies, and his father will have to replace him with Helmer, the son he has, not the son he wished he had.
The power of this book is the universality of this experience, in other words, we all have a twin brother who died about the time we reached adulthood and we will all have to face for many years the consequences of our twin's death and learn to overcome the natural resentment against our parents' nostalgic attitude towards their beloved dead son/daughter and their often resentful attitude towards who we have become and for some of us their inability to love us the way we are.
The beauty of "The Twin" lies in great part in the unraveling process of coming-of-age of a man at the age of fifty, because, even if we often forget it, we will go on growing and evolving all through our lives and that process that begins as we are born may have very different speeds at different times of our lives but only stops completely on that final day. With the approaching dead of his father, Helmer finds his own growth accelerating considerably. In this sense Mr. Bakker is a genius because it is truly difficult to come up with a compelling story of coming-of-age beyond the age of 20, as you'll find in the literature dedicated to such subject. This is a rare gem indeed.
To finish I would like to thank the author for having made the courageous and politically incorrect choice of writing a closeted book. I know that Mr. Bakker is an out-of-the-closet kind of man and the story of Helmer is really about the difficulty most gay men face of not having their sexuality accepted by their families. This is obvious for anyone who can read between the lines, after all Helmer's twin had a girlfriend, but Helmer only has a few "fishy" male friends, highly suspicious. However is by making this point so subtle that the book gains most of its strength (this is my way of avoiding to use the word universality again). I'm sure Bakker's bank account is at least as happy as I am about that choice, after all had the subject of the book been more explicit, not only I, but most of its reader's would have been unable to identify with it. For anyone willing to criticize this choice, I'll remind you that a gay men is 99.9...% (I'm unsure how many 9 should go here, but quite a lot I'd guess) the same as any other man, and only the prejudices of our society turn such a small detail as sexual orientation into such a big deal. After all I'm sure it shouldn't be so different to have to hear your parents regretting how you did not become a doctor as to hear them regret how you didn't marry that nice girlfriend you had in high school, if you exclude the shameful virulence homophobic attitudes can reach.
As a young man, Helmer heads off to college while his twin brother, Henk, works at home and plans to eventually take over the family farm. But Henk dies tragically and Helmer is forced to return home. And this is where he has stayed, living out his bleak, lonely life -
Now in his fifties, Helmer cares for the farm and his ailing father, with whom he has never gotten along. As their relationship further sours and as his father’s health deteriorates, his brother’s fiancé contacts him to ask if her troubled son can come and work with him.
Feelings of anger, loss, and longing permeate the narrative from page one and yet it is written and translated (from the Dutch) with a light, almost humorous touch. Altogether, The Twin is a beautifully written, marvelously spare, and ultimately uplifting book.
This is a spellbinding book, written by Gerbrand Bakker, and a finalist for the Best Translated Book Award for 2009 (or 2010) The protagonist is one of a pair of twins. One twin, Henk, who plans to run
I became interested in reading this book as it is one of the acclaimed books, written in a language foreign to me, that has been beautifully translated into English by David Colmer, who has done a stellar job.
The low key life of this man unfolds in such a way that it draws the reader in and piques and holds our interest. Even the cover illustration for the book, with the grazing cattle almost appearing to walk on the mirror-like surface of the water and the reflected sky add to the subtle impact which is offered by the author's story and is maintained throughout the book.
The countryside of Holland itself and a lone, persistent crow both figure prominently as key elements of the unfolding story of the twin. There is some anticipation that something may happen, but, the reader is only guessing at what that might be, which creates some lovely tension.
Helmer's life does offer a profound example of boerenleven, a Dutch noun derived from boeren (farmers) + leven (life, living). It means the country life, or the way of life of a farmer or agricultural employee. It seems somewhat to be a life of quiet desperation, though thinking back on the novel, there seems to be a bit of redemption also.
This is a book that I would recommend to readers looking for the fresh experience of reading a well written novel, translated capably and beautifully into the English language.
Thirty-five years later, Helmer is still at the farm, caring for a dying father, maintaining the
This is a languid tale, simply told, capturing the mundane lifestyle of a middle-aged man, dealing with bitter isolation and second chances. It’s reminiscent of [Out Stealing Horses], although darker in its tone and themes. This debut novel may not be for everyone, but I enjoyed its quiet beauty.
Helmer relates the time spent caring for his distant father and the farm, his association with his neighbours and their two young boys, the period he takes on a young lad to help around the farm ,and as he looks back to his friendship with a young farmhand in his father employ. We follow Helmer as he moves from being a man who had no choice to approaching the possibility of being his own master.
The Twin is a beautiful story about a basically lonely man. There are no great dramas here, no cliff-hangers, with perhaps the exception of one brief episode, it is simply a gentle yet captivating tale; a most enjoyable read.
The Financial Times said that 'The Twin' "could so easily be a bleak tale of regret" but thanks to the writer's skill it actually contained much "humour". I am afraid that for me it was very much "a bleak tale of regret". J. M. Coetzee also used the word "humour" in connection with this book, which suggests two things to me, one that humour is indeed subjective, and two that I have probably been right in my previous assumptions that I would not enjoy the writing of J. M. Coetzee.
Why do serious reviewers lavish such high praise on some of the most desolate novels ever written? Have they been spending time with the many music critics who heap adulation on compositions that sound like an accident in a blacksmith's workshop? In the case of this particular book a more appropriate musical analogy would be to a string quartet with minimalist tendencies.
This one just wasn't for me.
Although I appreciated the deft way in which the author, Gerbrand Bakker, depicts the quiet angst of an emotionally frustrated man, I was not drawn into the story the way I usually am with a well-written book. Perhaps I was unable to empathize adequately with Helmer, being younger, female, and more decisive. Or perhaps the quiet, slow moving book was simply not meshing with my reading mood. The result is that although I could appreciate the book, I couldn’t like it. I have no doubt, however, that others will find it compelling.
Drizzle isn't much more than mist with delusions of grandeur...
Spare. Modest. Melancholy. Affirming. Clear. Concise. This is a book that made me frequently turn back the pages to get a better feel for Helmer, who grows into a new man by the time he sorts out his world. Farm life is portrayed through the winter and spring, and I became completely absorbed in the simple but straightforward sentence structure, as I woke up each day to time my reading with the farmer's early morning feeding of his donkeys and milking of the cows.
The English translation by David Colmer is spot-on...I felt the drizzle on my face and the warm breath of the sheep on my neck. And that, my friend, is writing.
Book Season = Winter (don't know what we want)
The story is about a farmer and his old, dying, father. He has a hate-love relationship with his
Helmut lost his twin
And Helmut begins to think about his life.
Wonderful.
If you are American, did you know that books written in English are translated into American? words you may not be familiar with like "telephone box", "motor car", "nappy" are translated into words you may understand. If anyone
The downside to this, apart from the implied insult, is that Americans get feed a diet of books that are not true to their original context. I had kinda always thought that the whole idea of reading was to broaden our horizons, not to have wider horizons trammelled down to our naturally parochial view point.
In short I thought it was to broaden our minds not have broader stuff narrowed down to our local viewpoint.
So. For anyone who is not aware that the literary world extends into non-English languages you could start here. If you do, nothing in this book will be familiar, at least until someone does an American translation. It is translated from Dutch into English but it has not been "simplified".
You will be confronted by a man's inner thoughts and feelings since his twin brother drowns. In fact you could say that water is one of the main characters in this novel. Place names are all Dutch. But don't let that bother you, it doesn't matter if the village sounds like a disease a dog may get, the drift or current of this story will soon have you in its grip and it will sweep you along.
And time is spent on several different scales depending on who is the focus. We have young old and the seasons all sharing that same timeline but at different speeds.
There are a few strange things in this book like men getting in bed together without there being any sexual context at all, like none at all. A lot is unsaid but its 'unsaidness' is louder than if it had been spoken. This book was not written for us, it was written for the Dutch.
The fact that we can read it feels more like a scent of a foreign land, not an exotic, tropical paradise but the pragmatic wetness and dryness that is so fundamental to anything to do with Holland.
A surprising ending but not a twist, more of a coming into the light in a wholly satisfying way.
I really enjoyed every moment of this book, it is both haunting and about loss and yearning.
p.s. I've just re-read this and feel I have to point at that I was not criticising Americans per se only their publishing industry :-)