The Twin: The beauty and sadness of the platteland

Is The Twin about a man caring for his dying father while dreaming of another life in Denmark? Dutch writer Gerbrand Bakker’s debut novel The Twin is about all of those things. He began to write at random and the eventual work follows a Dutch farmer named Helmer, whose twin brother Henk dies in an accident, forcing Helmer to take remain on the family farm. His advanced age has left him with reduced mobility and Helmer offers the older man little sympathy, treating him with the same disdain his father had for Helmer throughout his life. Dutch society has a strong sense of family unity, the Dutch can be very slow to reveal themselves to others and the countryside is very flat and grey, which can be both reflected stunningly in Golden Age landscape paintings and desolately as in Bakker’s The Twin.