Gerbrand Bakker

Audio

Transcript

Ramona Koval: Welcome to The Book Show, Gerbrand.

Gerbrand Bakker: Hello!

Ramona Koval: And congratulations on the prize and on writing such a tender novel.

Gerbrand Bakker: Thank you very much.

Ramona Koval: Well, can we begin by hearing a little of the work, and this is from the very beginning of the novel. Could you read a little bit for us?

Gerbrand Bakker: I can, yes. Chapter one: [Gerbrand Bakker reads excerpt from : from 'I've put father upstairs. I had to park him on a chair first to take the bed apart...' to '...But it so dark and discoloured that I can't make out any sheep at all, no matter how hard I try.']

Ramona Koval: Gerbrand Bakker there, reading from The Twin, which has won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

Gerbrand, it's clear that Helmer is a dutiful son: he cares for the needs of the old man, but just to a point. He often leaves him unwashed, or even unfed, for some time. There's a lot of resentment of the father that can be expressed in these ways. But it's very hard to care for someone who's been remote from you for many years, isn't it? It's harder, I think, than caring for someone you love.

Gerbrand Bakker: Well, of course. If you love someone, it's very easy to care for him or her. But the funny thing is that in the beginning of the book, one can really think, 'Whoa! This main character, Helmer, is really cruel to his father.' I on purpose left open how often he gets a slice of bread or a tangerine or something, or a glass of water. But in the course of the book, they get closer and closer. So by putting his father upstairs and creating a physical distance, the main character also creates some sort of, well, connection at last with his father.

Ramona Koval: Yes. This character, though... at the beginning he's been very dutiful for quite a long time. He seems resentful and angry because part of him thinks that his father ruined his life. But can this be totally true?

Gerbrand Bakker: No.

Ramona Koval: What are the things that stop us from acting in the world, that make us timid? I mean, surely there are sometimes things that we need to change in order to change the way we live.

Gerbrand Bakker: Yeah, you're very right, and I think that this main character, Helmer, is not really angry with his father but he's angry with himself. But very often it's easier to be angry with someone else than with yourself, because how can you direct anger onto yourself? So he is angry, but I don't think he's that angry with his father because he very much realises that he could have changed his own life 30 years ago, 35 years ago. He could have said to his father, you know, 'You keep this farm and you do the work and I'll just go on with my studies.' But he didn't; he wanted to in way—and this is something I realised long after I'd written the book and it was published and it was translated already, even—I realised that what he has been doing for 35 years is, well, milking the cows and caring for the sheep and the other animals and the farm itself—but what he has really done is create some sort of monument for his dead brother. That's why he works, that's why he doesn't think, that's why he just puts his head under the cows and milks.

And then on this page one when he does put his father upstairs, that's the moment that he really realises, well, 'I can do something and I want to do something,' and that's when it starts.

Ramona Koval: Yes, I can change things, even if it's that I can change where I sleep. Because you describe beautifully this set—up in the kitchen where everybody... he's still sitting in the same chair sometimes that he sat in as a child, where his brother and he would sit in this and that chair; the father would sit here; the mother would sit there. And the very moment of sitting in another chair seems like a revolution.

Gerbrand Bakker: Yep. But then he gets so confused by that that he's startled by himself and he looks out of the window if somebody sees him, and then, if I remember correctly (I wrote the book eight years ago), he sits on all the chairs just for good measure, just to get it right again.

Ramona Koval: Gerbrand, the idea of being a twin is something that has been very powerful in Helmer's life. He says that, thinking back on his childhood with his brother, he says, 'We were two boys with one body.' And then when the brother gets a girlfriend and wants to share her bed rather than the one he's always shared with his brother, they become a pair of twins with two bodies. Tell me about how you imagined the twin experience. What drew you to this idea of the twins?

Gerbrand Bakker: Um, well you'd have to ask my therapist really. No...

Ramona Koval: [Laughs] Have you got your therapist there?

Gerbrand Bakker: No, no, he's...

Ramona Koval: Well, we'll have to ask you then.

Gerbrand Bakker: ...he's not here, so I have to answer this myself. I'm not quite sure why I am so interested—or not just interested but sometimes it looks even obsessed—with twins. I know a couple of twins; I've written about another pair of twins in another book. What I think happened in The Twin, which for me still is a very strange title because the Dutch title is Boven is het stil—'It's quiet upstairs'—but for the English—speaking countries they chose the title The Twin...

Ramona Koval: We couldn't understand, 'It's quiet upstairs', do you think?

Gerbrand Bakker: 'It's quiet upstairs': well, what you lose in this translation is if you've got the Dutch word, 'boven', 'up there'...

Ramona Koval: Or 'above'...

Gerbrand Bakker: 'Above', yes, so that can mean many different things. It can be symbolic as well.

Ramona Koval: About heaven or something?

Gerbrand Bakker: Yeah, or whatever you like, whatever the reader likes. But if you then use the word 'upstairs', that's, well, only upstairs, that's not heaven. But that's something else. So they chose The Twin, and The Twin is really about loneliness and coming to terms with loneliness. So I realise that for this book I maybe had to use a twin, because I cannot imagine two people—especially identical twins—being more at one, together. You always hear these stories, right, about people who are twins and who are separated in different countries and still they feel what the other one experiences and stuff like that. So I thought, well, 'If I want to make this main character really, really lonely, what is it I have to do? Well, I have to make his twin brother die.' So that's... the twin thing and the loneliness thing in this book are really, really connected. They are... yeah... Because, for me, I think I'm very jealous of twins. I think I would have liked to be one myself, very much. Maybe that's why I wrote this book.

Ramona Koval: Did you have siblings?

Gerbrand Bakker: Oh yes, a lot. I've four brothers and a sister.

Ramona Koval: And you wanted to be a twin. They weren't close enough for you? The four brothers and a sister?

Gerbrand Bakker: Um, well they were, and they still are, but they're not twins, you know; they are still separate brothers and a separate sister. So no matter how much I love them—and we laugh and we cry and we swear; we did a lot of swearing when we were younger, and fighting—but still, they're not twins. That's something I imagine being something completely different.

Ramona Koval: You describe it beautifully that they were used to sleeping together and they were used to their bodies being together. And you can imagine as little babies that they were used to always finding a warmth in the bed, some other feet in the bed. I remember the description of the other feet, and that his body is lonely for another body.

Gerbrand Bakker: Yep, yep. And that's something I also really like in writing, that you don't as much use language or dialogue to express something that people and also animals—because I write a lot about animals all the time—that he, you said it correctly, his body is lonely and he doesn't even for a while realise that it is his dead twin brother, but his body feels something, experiences something. I love that, I really love that. I also love being sick myself, not from having an illness, but being sick from something I can't cope with in my mind or something. I experience it every now and then, my body responses; I love that, I love the way the body, the human body, takes over in moments when you can't cope in your mind, or you don't want to cope in your mind or whatever—I love that. It's a wonderful thing. And with body, maybe, you also have to think of feelings are superior to the mind.

Ramona Koval: Mm—hmm. The mind is very proud though, isn't it?

Gerbrand Bakker: Yeah, but a mind is also very overrated. Don't you agree?

Ramona Koval: Ah, I don't know. I like the mind; I'm used to the mind.

Gerbrand Bakker: Well, yeah, it's OK, but I think it's got something overrated as well. I was just speaking to you about animals, and a lot of people always say to me, 'Why do you always write about animals? Why do you...' you know. So if people ask you questions, you have to think about it. I don't think a lot myself, but when people ask you questions you are obliged to think about it. And then I realised that I like animals because—also in daily life—because animals are just body, nothing more. They can't speak. They probably think but, you know, we will never know what they think. It's like an elementary way of connecting to, well, an organism. So that's why I love animals, you know, the way you interact with them on a very basic level. I would love to interact with people on the level of an animal, which is usually impossible.

Ramona Koval: But if you're lucky you can.

Gerbrand Bakker: If you're lucky you can, but usually the mind is in between it, so it is a bit difficult.

Ramona Koval: And Gerbrand, you write about... well, the animals are important in this book, but donkeys are important in this book, whether a person pays attention to the donkeys or is afraid of them. And somebody says to Helmer, 'You're a donkey man, all right.' What is a 'donkey man'?

Gerbrand Bakker: Well, on this farm where Helmer has been milking the cows for 35 years, with or without his father, all the animals that were there were his father's animals. And of course the cow from 35 years ago is not the cow from now, because he will be dead, but calves get born. So all these animals still are related, have got something to do with his father. And these two donkeys are in fact the only two animals he himself bought. They are his own choice; they are his donkeys. And it's not one or three, it's two, which is I think also saying something.

Ramona Koval: Yes.

Gerbrand Bakker: So they are... well, he owns them and he loves them. And the little neighbour boys, who are, I believe, six and eight years old, they love the donkeys as well, so automatically Helmer also loves the neighbours—these little boys—he likes them very much.

And somewhere halfway of the book there is this Henk, little Henk, the son of the former fiancée of his dead twin brother, who comes to live on the farm for a while. He's 18 or 19. He does not like or love the donkeys and so that also reflects the way that they communicate, their relationship, little Henk—I call him little Henk because big Henk is the dead twin brother—little Henk and Helmer. They have a relationship that is very much based on the fact that little Henk does not like, is afraid even, of the donkeys. So for Helmer, the donkeys are very important, they are like a piece of himself.

Ramona Koval: And this point in the story when he meets Riet again, the woman his brother was going to marry and, as you say, agrees to allow her son, little Henk, to come and stay on the farm and learn some skills. And the young man is a bit sullen and difficult, but he makes an interesting connection with the old man dying upstairs. In fact he says he quite likes the old man, now and that for the reader is a little bit of a puzzle, because we've got this impression that the old man was so hard on his son and the son really hates his father. But does this mean that the old man has changed, or does it mean the old man didn't get on with his second son, Helmer, simply because they found each other strange?

Gerbrand Bakker: Um, that's interesting. I think it simply is, Helmer has known his father for 55 years—he's that old—and little Henk only gets to know him now—and now meaning 2002, because that's the year the book plays in. So I think, you know it as well, you've heard stories about somebody, maybe a friend of a friend, or let's say an acquaintance of a friend. And about this acquaintance people say, 'Well, he or she... stupid woman, stupid man, and we don't like him,' you know? And then you meet this person and you think, 'Huh? Why? How come? Why do they say that this person is a stupid person?', because you are new to this person. And I think that's what simply happens in the book. Little Henk doesn't know the old man and probably the old man is nice and friendly to this young boy.

But you are of course also right if you say that the father has always been extra not nice to Helmer, because his first choice for the son taking over the farm was Henk, the twin brother. So there's always been this resentment with the old father as well. So they really have, and have had, a relationship that was doomed to be terrible and wrong and full of misunderstandings. But even so, in the end, I think there is a point in the book that he is saying something to his son which means, 'I love you.' But he's unable to say these words because, you know, you don't say those words when you live in north Holland and you are a farmer—it's totally impossible to do it. But then he says something like... I don't know quite what he says, but he smells that his son has taken up smoking and then he's lying in the bed, almost dead, and then he says, 'Well, you are a strange one, you.'

Ramona Koval: That's the one; he says, 'You're a strange one...'

Gerbrand Bakker: 'You are a strange one, you,' and that's... A reader pointed me to this, I didn't realise it myself, but a reader... I did a lecture and this reader said, 'Wait a minute, that's one of the most wonderful love...' I don't know the word in English...

Ramona Koval: Expressions of love?

Gerbrand Bakker: '...expressions of love I've ever read in a book.' And I said, 'Well, thank you.' And then I realised that she was right. It is an expression of love. Yeah.

Ramona Koval: Mm. Well, I'm speaking with Gerbrand Bakker here on The Book Show on ABC Radio National. Ramona Koval with you and we're talking about The Twin, his novel, which has won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

You know, it's almost as if Helmer is seeking his brother in men he meets. He seeks the friendship, he even seeks the erotic qualities of the closeness he felt, doesn't he?

Gerbrand Bakker: Yeah, he does, and it's because of that that he even seeks physical contact with men. There are a lot of readers, there were a lot of readers, in Holland that did not realise that maybe this Helmer was a gay, a gay farmer. I once did a lecture in a book shop and there was a big table in the shop and there was a group of people on one side of the table and a group of people on the other side. And one side of the table said, 'Helmer is gay!' and the other side of the table said, 'No, he's not gay!' And so this went on for a while, and I was sitting in the middle, and then in the end all these people looked at me and well, you know, with an asking look on their face, a question mark on their face. And I said, 'I don't know. I really don't know. It's up to you. Whatever you want Helmer to be, he is.' I myself am in fact not quite sure if he is gay. It's more like, well, what you said: the physical relationship with his dead brother, that's what he's after.

Ramona Koval: You describe the 'dailyness' of his life in great detail: the painting of the room, the cleaning, the making and remaking of beds. Now, I love putting the clean sheets on the bed, the smelling of the new pillow cases, and that's great pleasure for the reader (for me!) to read about this, the pleasure of having a hot shower at the end of the day. This is what Helmer's life is made of, these moments, small pleasures that he can get out of each day.

And the silences abound. People communicate in looks and glances and waves—they wave across the paddocks, the fields. And he describes his relationship with his mother when she was alive as an alliance of glances and not words.

Gerbrand Bakker: But it's not something, it's not something I've done on purpose. I remember I was working on another book in those days and the other book, it didn't work and I was very frustrated. And I got the idea for The Twin whilst walking, doing a walking holiday in the mountains on Corsica. I got this idea, I don't know from where: a son, a father, and the son doing a terrible thing to the father. That was all. That was everything I had. And then nothing happened, you know? The story didn't grow on me. But I kept this idea in my head, which is quite frustrating. And then I remember in November 2002, I sat down and I just started to write. I had absolutely no idea what I was going to write, where I was going. I had this father, I had this son—which is nice, you know, two characters in a book, so things might happen—but that was it. I really didn't know what I was writing about. And it's something I really love to do.

I just finished my new novel yesterday and then... I mean, really finished. I had it finished before but there was editing done and stuff. So yesterday I really finished it. And this new one is again a book that I don't quite understand myself. And if that happens—so I've learnt by now—it's OK. It's OK if a writer, if I do not understand what a book, a complete book I've written is about. Everything I've been telling you in the last half hour about The Twin is really not something that I've thought of myself, but has been pointed out to me by readers when I was doing lectures. They were the ones that told me, 'Oh, that's about that...', and '...the donkeys are of course a symbol for this.' And there even was once—which was very funny—a man who stood up and he said, 'Yeah, I'm a member of the this and that reading society, ' with a Christian name in it, so I thought, 'Whoa, watch out now.' And he stood up and in 10 minutes time, he compared my book with the Bible. From A—Z, everything was there, he said, everything was there: reconciliation, of course a father dies...

Ramona Koval: ...a donkey.

Gerbrand Bakker: A donkey... Everything that was in the Bible is also in my book. And then I just sat back and I listened to him and I said, 'Well, thank you very much, this is very nice for me, but I am not brought up with the Bible, or even religion, about which I'm very happy. So it must have been very, very good of me to be able to write a book to reflect your Bible.' And then he fell silent and he said, 'Well, yeah, well, OK.' But there's nothing religious in it, or, again, not on purpose.

Ramona Koval: You've stopped... like, yesterday you've finished a book, and are you in a panic now? I mean, I know you've got a new idea, but are you going to give yourself a little bit of time to not write something? I noticed that you describe yourself, or other people describe you as a gardener. Are you still a gardener?

Gerbrand Bakker: I am, still, yes. I have a garden this afternoon, I have a garden tomorrow.

Ramona Koval: So you do other people's gardens?

Gerbrand Bakker: Yeah, yeah, I still do other people's gardens and yesterday I got an email off people in a very new city in Holland, and they said to me, 'When are we going to get our garden design?' I've been a bit busy the last couple of weeks. So, I also do garden designs, and I do it as much as possible. So, no, I'm not in a panic now. I've got other stuff to do.

Ramona Koval: And when you're in the garden, do you think about writing or do you think about gardening?

Gerbrand Bakker: I tend to think about gardening. But you can't help it, if you do stuff in a garden: I think, I always say, with the back of my head. In the back of your head, all the time you are working on a novel. But that's only when I am working on a novel; when I'm not writing a novel... but then, you know, sometimes I think about a column. I write a weekly column about animals or nature. So there's always something to think about whilst gardening.

Ramona Koval: Well, the book is a great pleasure to read and very moving. It's called The Twin; it's published in Australia by Scribe; and Gerbrand Bakker, thank you so much for speaking to us today on The Book Show.

Gerbrand Bakker: You're very welcome.

Publications

Title: The Twin

Author: Gerbrand Bakker

Author: http://www.gerbrandsdingetje.nl/