The Twin

US: Vintage Digital, 2008. Paperback. Very Good. A copy that has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged. When his twin brother dies in a car accident, Helmer is obliged to return t o the small family farm. He resigns himself to taking over his brother&apos ;s role and spending the rest of his days 'with his head under a cow&a pos;. After his old, worn-out father has been transferred upstairs, Helmer sets a bout furnishing the rest of the house according to his own minimal preferen ces. 'A double bed and a duvet', advises Ada, who lives next door , with a sly look. Then Riet appears, the woman once engaged to marry his t win. Could Riet and her son live with him for a while, on the farm? The Twin is an ode to the platteland, the flat and bleak Dutch countryside with its ditches and its cows and its endless grey skies. Ostensibly a novel about the countryside, as seen through the eyes of a farmer, The Twin is, in the end, about the possibility or impossibility of taking life into one's own hands. It chronicles a way of life which has resisted modernity, is culturally apart, and yet riven with a kind of romantic longing.