The charm of Bakker’s book is how finely every element is balanced, how perfectly the story is paced. Helmer is aware that his misdirected life is largely his own fault. He could have disobeyed his father, but ‘always just let things happen.’ His ‘outrageously ugly’ mother, with whom he shared an unspoken complicity against the father, was also ‘outrageously kind-hearted,’ but didn’t speak up for him and, even if she had, he would not have taken advantage of it. This fatal lack of purposefulness is also Helmer’s appeal and gives him a deep affinity with the animals who have made his life a prison … The great pleasure of this novel is how it has just enough plot to allow us to relish its beautifully turned observations of birds and beasts, weather and water. Helmer’s capacity to respond to the natural world and enjoy small practical tasks takes the edge off the story’s sadness, redeeming the life he thinks of as wasted.
The novel, told in the first person, is deliberately, deceptively simple. The plot is minimal, the language plainly descriptive. The characters reveal themselves through spare dialogue and gestures. The humor is dark … With only a few characters, with almost no drama, Bakker manages to explore the resentments and obligations of blood relations; the sting of being disfavored; the stun of loss — how for decades Helmer couldn't hear his own name without placing ‘Henk and’ in front of it. Yet the novel also makes clear how life — temperaments, interests, sexuality — was already prying the brothers apart. Helmer's desires are not just unfulfilled: They're often unarticulated. Homoerotic tension curls through the novel, and the expressions of strong feeling sear because they're so rare. The freedom Helmer claims at the end is all the more moving for its smallness.
The story is eerily familiar, whether you are rural or urban, male or female, happy or unhappy. Twin brothers grow up on the family farm with their domineering, harsh father and their quiet, subservient mother … In the course of the novel, the still subconscious of the twin left behind is revealed to us, memory by memory. As these memories slash the surface of his life, they cannot help but erode his calloused exterior. Gerbrand Bakker's writing is fabulously clear, so clear that each sentence leaves a rippling wake.
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.
Clearly this is a novel of lost chances, of lost lives, of sadness and regret. It is told with subtlety, makes beautiful links to the landscape and nature, and is occasionally rather fascinating, in a voyeuristic kind of way, on the weird world of twins. The break between the two happened not at Henk's death, but earlier, when Henk met Riet, and the twin finds their coupling unconscionable. But these men are so silent in the assessment of their own lives, and this is such a sad and bleak story, that no matter how delicate the touch and how subtle the undercurrents, it makes for a sad, bleak read.
