ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Some of the best novels manage to say the most with few words. That's the case in a book that comes recommended by the writer Amy Waldman. As part of our series You Must Read This, she tells us about "The Twin," by Gerbrand Bakker.
AMY WALDMAN: I found "The Twin" sitting on a coffee table at a writers' colony in 2009. It carried praise from J.M. Coetzee. That seemed ample justification for using it to avoid my own writing. I finished it - weeping - a day later, and I've been puzzling over its powerful hold on me ever since.
I've recommended it again and again. And while I can't say it's entirely undiscovered - it won the 2010 IMPAC Dublin Award - no one I know ever seems to have heard of it.
The plot is minimal, the language plainly descriptive. The characters reveal themselves through spare dialogue and gestures. The humor is dark. It begins: I've put Father upstairs. He sat there like a calf that's just a couple of minutes old with a directionless, wobbly head, and eyes that drift over things.
The narrator is Helmer, a 55-year-old dairy farmer whose identical twin, Henk, died some three decades before. Their mother is dead now, too, leaving only Helmer to care for his aging father - the same father who favored Henk and who, after Henk's death, reclaimed Helmer for the farm.
You're done in Amsterdam, Father said, with typical economy, his words crushing Helmer's academic dreams. Ever since, Helmer has been frozen in place. "The Twin" chronicles his partial, hesitant thaw.
Half my life, I haven't thought about a thing, Helmer, a bachelor, observes. I've milked the cows day after day. In a way, I curse them, the cows, but they're also warm and serene. There's nothing as calming, as protected, as a shed full of sedately breathing cows on a winter's evening.
With only a few characters, with almost no drama, Bakker manages to explore the resentments and obligations of blood relations, the sting of disfavor, the stun of loss. Yet the novel also makes clear how their temperaments, interests and sexuality were already prying the brothers apart. Helmer's desires are not only unfulfilled; they're often unarticulated. Homoerotic tension curls through the novel, and the expressions of strong feeling sear because they're so rare.
Bakker wrote subtitles for nature films before becoming a novelist. In the book, relations with animals seem proxies for human ones: a botched killing of kittens conveys Father's casual cruelty; the two donkeys Helmer buys, despite their lack of utilitarian purpose, his own tenderness. At the time I read "The Twin," I was in the Hudson River Valley, an area of farms and open hills. Time had slowed. I wonder if this opened me not just to "The Twin's" story but its rhythms. Its prose, its unspooling, somehow mimics nature itself, in which the most incremental changes accrete to the progression of life.
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SIEGEL: That's Amy Waldman. She's the former South Asia bureau chief for the New York Times, and she is the author of the novel "The Submission."