Gerbrand Bakker on The Twin, Argentine Men, Edmund White

Gerbrand Bakker's tremendous IMPAC winning novel The Twin goes on sale today in paperback (also ebook). Any plot summary will reduce the pleasure of discovery in this beautifully paced story, but: In the Netherlands a middle aged single man -- the surviving, less outgoing half of twin brothers Henk and Helmer -- still lives on the family's very small farm with his aged father who forced him to abandon college to tend dairy cows. Helmer finally starts to make changes in his life when he takes in a 19 year-old border connected to their past.

The thoroughly Dutch (polite, reticent) Bakker survived the agony of being interviewed by talking more about books than about himself. He does reveal "I don’t have a wife, or children, or a dog, or a garden.” As for his taste in literature:

“A friend of mine told me what I should read, and I did, Cheever and Ring Lardner, Iris Murdoch, I love Iris Murdoch. The Sea, The Sea is my favourite. In it she shows that the magical can affect the ordinary. I like that. I also love Raymond Carver and John Updike. You know, I only read Winnie the Pooh when I was 20; it is a great book, and also The Wind in the Willows . Hmm, yes, wonderful.”

Bakker also says: “A book that was very important to me was Edmund White’s The Beautiful Room Is Empty. It is the only one of his books I have read. It was enough, it taught me a lot. I read most of Nabokov's work and loved it, but now, no, I can’t read him at all. I am a slow reader. People begin mentioning books and I think . . .”

Last month, Bakker wrote a brief, charming op-ed for the NYT about the Netherlands reaching the World Cup finals. He said, "And in 1978, we lost to Argentina — which left us with no trauma at all, Argentines being people from another continent, across a huge and very deep ocean, who make a lot of noise and are cocky and handsome, and so are nothing like the Dutch at all."

(Photo of Bakker and his translator by Kenneth O'Halloran, Irish Times.)

Comments

[miguel]

hey. thanks to this post I've just ordered Bakker's book from Amazon. So I thought a little thank you not would be in order.