The Twin by Gerbrand Bakker,
is the winner of the 2010 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
Published by Harvill Secker / Vintage, UK The Twin is the first novel
by Gerbrand Bakker, beautifully translated from the original Dutch by David
Colmer. Though rich in detail, it’s a sparely written story, with the
narrator’s odd small cruelties, laconic humour and surprising tendernesses
emerging through a steady, well-paced, unaffected style.
Helmer van Wonderen is a farmer. For forty years
he’s lived a stalled, frustrated life, with every decision on the farm being
made by his father. It wasn’t the life Helmer intended. Through childhood he
was one half of twins – an entity he even thought of inwardly as ‘Henk and
Helmer’. But Henk was killed at eighteen in a car driven by his girlfriend,
Riet, who was then ordered away by the boys’ grieving father. Helmer was
called home from university to take his brother’s place on the farm. And
then the mother he loved died.
But now Helmer’s father, too, is dying, and the shift in power between the
two of them sets off great changes. Helmer moves the old man upstairs. “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.” Is this indifference, coldness, or Helmer’s first chance at revenge
for what has been an unlived life ‘with his head under a cow’? And perhaps
also for his father’s own seemingly deliberate cruelties, both on the farm
itself and to the son whom he could never love as much as the dead brother.
Into what seems set fair to be a stunning and compelling study of unlocked
grief and frozen hate comes Riet’s wayward teenage son, sent by his
exasperated mother to get an inkling of experience away from home. This
cheerful lad (“How is the dying going, Mr Van Wonderen?”), with all his
openness and shifting moods and frank demands, hastens the changes that
Helmer has already starting making in the house, and stirs up more reminders
of the past. Deftly, this poignant and astonishingly tender story opens up
into an exhilarating account of how a man can come to understand himself for
the first time. It is a tale of redemption.
The book convinces from first page to last. With quiet mastery the story
draws in the reader. The writing is wonderful: restrained and clear, and
studded with detail of farm rhythms in the cold, damp Dutch countryside. The
author excels at dialogue, and Helmer’s inner story-telling voice also comes
over perfectly as he begins to change everything around him. There are
intriguing ambiguities, but no false notes. Nothing and no one is
predictable, and yet we believe in them all: the regular tanker driver, the
next door neighbour with her two bouncing children, and Jaap, the old farm
labourer from the twins’ childhood who comes back to the farm in time for
the last great upheaval, as Helmer finally takes charge of what is left of
his own life.
