When I am reading a book for a review I will often fold the corners of certain pages where I see something that I would like to come back to. Perhaps it is a moment when something important is revealed, or a great example of how the author writes; their style, the way they describe things, or the way they reveal their characters to the reader.
It soon became clear when reading Jente Posthuma’s new novel that it contains so many examples of the central character’s thinking and outlook that every page would be folded. The revelations come thick and fast as you are overwhelmed with knowledge and information. There is almost too much disclosure.
What I’d rather not think about is the story of twins, brother and sister, their closeness and their gradual drift apart until the point where the brother takes his own life. We then focus on the sister coming to terms with the loss and grief and space left in her own life. It is a book of dysfunctional characters. The dysfunctional characters have dysfunctional relationships. It would be hard to read for anyone who has suffered the loss of someone close to suicide.
The book is composed entirely of small chapters – none of them are longer than three pages. Some are just a handful of lines. We jump around, back and forth through time to memories of childhood and growing up, to holidays around the world, and finally to a time when the narrator’s brother has passed and she is coming to terms with living a different life, which will never be the same again. Some chapters are about things that relate to twins or to suicide. Some talk about the number of suicides in New York and about the people who threw themselves from the twin towers. Some chapters are just not comfortable.
I supposed that I have walked away from this book with an echo of another called The Discomfort of Evening also by a Dutch writer, Marieke Lucas Rijeveld. There is a similar vein of dark humour running through both books. Not everything is doom and gloom. The brother turns out to be gay, something his sister fully understands, but equally something he is unable to tell his parents for another eight years. The parents are geologists, always “looking at the ground” or collecting fossils.
“It took another eight years for my brother to tell our mother that he was into boys, a fact so obvious to me that his solemn tone seemed absurd. My brother was the norm, and I was the anomaly, which is why I didn’t understand my mother’s odd reaction. She acted like it was something she needed to absolve. It’s not a big deal was all she said. Just like the time he’d accidentally broken a fossilised turd from her collection, and she spent the entire weekend bent over her desk in the study, sticking the pieces back together with special glue.”
We never learn the name of the sister, our first-person narrator. But we do learn lots about her life. She works in a vintage clothes store and collects sweaters:
“The first sweater I bought with my own money was nice and warm and made of Icelandic wool. It wasn’t as soft as some of the sweaters I’d buy once I started working in the vintage shop, when one of my bedroom walls would gradually disappear behind a mountain of wool. I hung shelves from the floor to the ceiling and filled them with piles of sweaters, which, just like my father’s biscuit tins, were sorted according to colour. By my twenty-seventh birthday, I owned 142 sweaters, and it was high time I saw a therapist.”
When she does find herself a therapist, a semi-retired Jewish woman whose parents had both survived concentration camps, she gives her gifts of sweaters.
As the book progresses, we focus more and more on the life of the sister left behind and her attempts to understand and come to terms with what has happened. She inherits her brother’s apartment, and keeps it for herself as a sort of shrine and sanctuary. It is there she relentlessly reads his diaries and continues to watch episodes of Survivor. This short passage seems to sum up the whole situation:
“It was around this time he started working on his suicide note. Slept badly again, he’d written in his diary three weeks before his death. The ringing in my ears is driving me crazy. But I did start working on a letter that’s difficult for me to write. It’s now quarter to five and I’m feeling pretty awful. Maybe I should just eat some roasted nuts.
Three weeks before his death, he’d already known what he was going to do, that’s twenty-one days of him pretending to involve me in his life. In the letter, he’d written that he loved me and he was sorry. Sorry, he’d written. And he’d given me instructions. Don’t get angry, don’t fret, don’t blame yourself. Don’t feel stupid, I thought. Or lost, betrayed, abandoned.”
A book that may not be for everyone, but one that is a beautifully observed narration on someone who is not the easiest person to be around.
Reviewer: Marcus Hobson
Scribe