Description - The Twin by Gerbrand Bakker
WINNER OF THE 2010 INTERNATIONAL IMPAC DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2007 LIBRIS LITERATURE PRIZE
When his twin brother dies in a car accident, Helmer is obliged to return to the small family farm. He resigns himself to taking over his brother's role and spending the rest of his days 'with his head under a cow'.
After his old, worn-out father has been transferred upstairs, Helmer sets about furnishing the rest of the house according to his own minimal preferences. 'A double bed and a duvet', advises Ada, who lives next door, with a sly look. Then Riet appears, the woman once engaged to marry his twin. Could Riet and her son live with him for a while, on the farm?
The Twin is an ode to the platteland, the flat and bleak Dutch countryside, with its ditches and its cows and its endless grey skies.
Ostensibly a novel about the countryside, as seen through the eyes of a farmer, The Twin is, in the end, about the possibility or impossibility of taking life into one's own hands. It chronicles a way of life that has resisted modernity, is culturally apart, and yet is riven with a kind of romantic longing.
This prize-winning, bestselling Dutch novel, with its powerful sense of place, brooding atmosphere, and strong characters, brings to mind writers such as Graham Swift, Annie Proulx, and Cormac McCarthy.
'The Twin is a slow burner but also a beautiful example of understatement. It could so easily be a bleak tale of regret but Bakker's spartan prose eloquently conveys the humour of Helmer's awakening.'
-Melissa McClements, The Financial Times
'The characters Gerbrand Bakker brings to life as real - as confused and lost as they are humane and quietly strong. It leaves the reader touched and with the impression of having seen and smelled the ever-damp Dutch platteland.
-Sandra Lauckner-Rothschild, Times Literary Supplement
'Bakker is a kind of Dutch Cormac McCarthy, if you replace the American West with the Dutch countryside. It's an elegant, spare and psychologically astute evocation of rural life, its desolation balanced by quiet humour.'
-Cameron Woodhead, The Age
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