A chance encounter, a changed life

Article by: BETHANNE PATRICK , Special to the Star Tribune
Updated: November 20, 2010 - 9:12 AM

The Twin by Gerbrand Bakker

Photo: ,

Camera Star Tribune photo galleries

Camera view larger

0
comments
resize text
print
buy reprints

Tweet
share

email
Email share

your name

your email

recipients email

+ add a comment add a comment

The British expression "donkey's years" means "a long time," and the phrase is perfectly applied to the encounter between Helmer van Wonderen and his dead brother Henk's girlfriend Riet after 40 years, since Helmer's old-fashioned habit of keeping donkeys for work on his isolated, swampy Dutch farm is something straight out of the past.

Riet asks a favor of Helmer that changes the literal stick-in-the-mud's life. He agrees to hire her troubled teenaged son as a temporary farmhand, and this brings back his memories of the family's former farmhand, Jaap. Helmer realizes that though he's close to 60, his life isn't a closed book. Novelist Gerbrand Bakker's considerable achievement is to take a character and location that might work in a Breughel painting and make them thoroughly relevant and contemporary.

But while this prize-winning novel's setting is bucolic, Helmer's actions speak more to universal flaws than to pastoral. He closets his aging, infirm father in an upstairs bedroom; he snubs his flirtatious and generous neighbor; he agonizes over the slightest change of status quo yet dreams of release. Why? All is revealed, slowly, and with a wonderfully quirky, misanthropic deliberation that we haven't seen in, well, donkey's years.

THE TWIN

By: Gerbrand Bakker, translated by David Colmer.

Publisher: Archipelago Books, 343 pages, $16.

Review: "The Twin" is a finely calibrated meditation on family dynamics and individual dreams that will give quiet delight to readers from 13 to 90.