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.