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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