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Tuesday, 30 July 2013

The Twin

by Gerbrand Bakker




                                                          The Twin
                                                                       
Gerbrand Bakker ( The Netherlands)

Different themes are approached in this book : the links between identical twins and between father and son, love, homosexuality, death and old age .

Henk and Helmer are identical twins «  as alike as two lambs but from differents ewes ».
They live on a farm, a very quiet and secluded place, like frozen in times. Henk is his father’s favourite son ; they will stay on the farm together while Helmer is allowed to go to university .

Helmer « loses » his twin brother first when Henk falls in love with Riet. He is hurt and jealous.  For her, it is also a problem : « He has got a twin brother. How am I supposed to deal with that ? »

On a fateful day, Henk dies in a road accident. The father dismisses the bride to be, calls Helmer back to help on the farm. He has to give up all intellectual pursuit.

The mother stays  silent : «  What,  if instead of crying, Mother had said something to protect me from spending my life milking cows ? »

The father ruined Helmer’s life : « The family, the farm , the animals : an entity that was forced upon me ».  Hence, his hatred and cruelty towards his father that mirrored his father’s cruelty towards him . After the mother’s death, he will let his father die from neglect.

Helmer has never come to terms with the loss of his twin  brother : «  I have been doing things by halves. I have just had half a body ».

There is also a special and ambivalent relationship with Jaap , a former farmhand and Ada, a neighbour. 
The recurring sight of a hooded crow perched in an ash tree in front of the house is the symbol of looming death.

In the end, Helmer, in a kind a liberation from his past, moves to a rural part of Denmark, a land he has been fantasizing about for so long, a land of new opportunities .

Review by Anne

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