The Twin

Ada is sitting in my old spot. That’s were she always sits when she’s here, so she can see her husband’s farm through the side window and feel like she is keeping an eye on things, even though the farm is more than five hundred yards away. I’m sitting in Mother’s place. The hooded crow has been perching on the same branch in the ash for more than a week now. Saint Nicholas came – but not to our house – and went. It’s a Saturday, the sun is shinning and there is no wind. A clear December morning with everything very bare and sharp. A day to feel homesick. Not for home because that’s where I am, but for the days that were just like this, only long ago. Homesick isn’t the right word, perhaps I should say wistful. Ada wouldn’t understand. Not coming from here, she doesn’t remember days long ago that were just like this, here. (pg. 42)

The Twin by Gerbrand Bakker (translated from the Dutch by David Colmer) starts with Helmer, a middle-aged Dutch farmer,  moving his elderly and ailing father to the upstairs of the farmhouse and himself downstairs into his parent’s bedroom. Along the way he cleans, paints, tears up the carpet scouring away the existence of the old inhabitants. Already the reader feels the tension between the two men – the push and pull of old wounds and resentments. Helmer is approached by his twin’s former finance about taking in her troubled teenager. The teenager comes but this is not a novel about finding redemption through the young, rather it is about coming to terms with who you are, where you are. It is very much about the internal rather than the external. The novel takes place  on an isolated Dutch farm perched near a canal and there are very few characters – indeed little action. It is a book about a man coming to terms with the end of his life, the next twenty years of his life but the end nevertheless, coping with the loss of the last remaining member of his family – his last real human tie to his life for the past fifty years.

Bakker sets the novel in the present (2005) but also has Helmer reminiscing about the past. Helmer is the title character, a twin separated from his twin brother, Henk at first by a relationship his brother has with a girl and then by death when the twins are in their early twenties. At the death of his brother, Helmar must put aside his own dreams of schooling and join his father to work on the farm never quite replacing his  brother. It is hard to review The Twin because it is such a contemplative work. The writing is beautiful, evocative of both landscape and mood.  Bakker is able to show the tensions within a person as they struggle to separate from land, family, and relationships while also dealing with the question of the isolation in such separation. If you like books with lots of action, this isn’t the book for you. If you like books with introspection, contemplation about life, and beautiful descriptions of time passing, then this is the book for you. Bakker relies on the small daily occurrences of life on a farm, the subtle transitions of the seasons, the quiet changes of the weather to do some of the heavy lifting rather than loading the work with a heavy plot.

The Twin won the 2010 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award  beating such novels as The Elegance of the Hedgehog and Home. And it is easy to see why with passages such as this – one of many showcasing the isolation humans sometimes endure:

It’s ten thirty  in the morning. Raining from low clouds. As usual, the weathermen had it wrong. The kitchen light is on. The crooked ash gleams. The hooded crow is hunched over its branch. Now and then it ruffles its feathers without spreading its wings, which makes it look like a sparrow bathing in a puddle in the yard. A giant sparrow. I wait. The newspaper is laying on the table in front of me, but I can’t read. I sit and swear out the window. The clock buzzes; it’s quiet upstairs, there are a few mouthfuls of cold coffee left in my mug. It’s not the only quiet upstairs, it’s quiet everywhere, the rain taps softly on the window ledge, the road is wet and empty. I am alone, with no one to cuddle with. (pg. 150)

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