The Twin by Gerbrand Bakker is a quietly understated novel that brims with a slow-moving rage and a gentle, long-lived grief. It’s a story about loss, resentment and thwarted opportunities and examines what happens to people who — for whatever reason — don’t take things into their own hands, letting circumstances and family obligations dominate their lives.

Told in the first person from the perspective of a 55-year-old farmer, Helmer Van Wonderen, nothing much seems to happen and yet a lifetime of hurt is encapsulated in this coolly observed tale.

It’s set in the Waterlands region of the Netherlands, where Helmer now runs the family farm — 20 sheep and a handful of milking cows — single-handedly. His aged father, with whom he has a difficult relationship, has been installed in a bedroom upstairs, seemingly locked away and treated like an unwelcome lodger.

The tension between father and son is long-running, stemming from the death of Helmer’s twin, Henk, more than 30 years ago. Henk was the favoured son. He was in love with a girl called Riet and was set to inherit the farm. But when he died in a car accident, Helmer had to put his university studies on hold and return home. He has remained there ever since.

Now, having never married nor had children, Helmer is reassessing his life, wondering how he has so little to show for all the years that have come to pass. He realises he is the last in the line of Van Wonderens and becomes sentimental by this fact.

Without a wife, without kids and with a decrepit father who’s never wasted a word on family in my presence, I never expected myself to get sentimental about my own flesh and blood. Is it the farm? Our farm? A collection of buildings, animals and land I didn’t want anything to do with, an entity that was forced on me, but gradually became part of me?

He’s becoming increasingly agitated with his father, telling his neighbour Ada that his dad is going senile and that’s why she can’t go upstairs to say hello to him. There are other disturbing behaviours that indicate Hemler has a cruel streak.

But he’s also a man who has dreams. When he finds out another neighbour has sold his farm and moved to Denmark, Hemler wonders why he can’t pursue that kind of path, too. He sells three sheep so he can buy a detailed map of Denmark, which he gets framed and hangs on his bedroom wall. Every night, before sleep, he stares at the map and says aloud three or more towns, almost like an affirmation that one day he will get to visit them for real.

His ennui is further shaken by news the local livestock dealer is retiring, quickly followed by the milk tank driver. Is it time for Hemler to do something different too?

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What a beautifully written book!

This is the story of a man tending to the needs of his elderly father while he assesses his own.

Een prachtig, verstild verhaal. Echt schitterend.

It's books like The Twin that nudge me towards contemporary literature. Whereas I find most 19th-century novels amusing and 20th-century novels contemplative, these 21st-century novels are disquieting. Take Bakker's book. Prima facie, it's very calm and quiet. A middle-aged son lives on a family farm with his father. They are self-sufficient with their own animals and lead a minimalistic life. But we know since the first page-- as observers -- that things aren't as simple as they look. Beneath the gloss of rural idyll is a longstanding but unspoken hostility. The son lives with his father out of duty, since the father has been getting weaker by the day and he's the only one that's left of the family. The farm is a remnant of a past that is marked by the death of the son's twin brother -- a past that is in need to be forgotten but can never now be. The self-sufficiency is a mask of loneliness and the minimalism is a failure to adapt. As if such hostility isn't enough, Bakker blends his prose in such a way that memory can barely be distinguished from reality. There're two characters who bear the same name -- Henk the dead twin brother and Henk the dead twin brother's fiancé's son -- who move or be moved in and out of the story without explicit clarification. This phenomenon is further complicated by the roles that are taken on by the son himself: sometimes as a brother, other times as a father, occasionally as a lover, perhaps.

FI NAL LY. i'm never reading this again.