March 2013

What makes identical twins so intriguing is the paradox of sameness and difference together. We imagine that they are the same on the outside but inscrutably different on the inside (though how can we ever know?), or perhaps the same

Strange Love in the North June 24, 2010 by Tim Parks The remarkable novel Out Stealing Horses by the Norwegian writer Per Petterson opens with an image of titmice banging into the window of the narrator’s remote cabin home and falling dizzily into the evening

8/10/2010 Another rave for The Twin: "Tense with unuttered yearning. . . . The greatness of this book lies . . . in a mounting intricacy of feeling as life begins to burgeon out of a stony, wasted existence. . . . But instead

I just finished The Twin by Gerbrand Bakker, which is basically all about themes that I associate with crushing boredom -- farmers and old, sick parents and rural areas -- but I couldn’t put it down. It’s subtle, quiet, hilarious, cruel, beautiful,

"A chilling story of the past's influence on the present" - 'The Twin' by Gerbrand Bakker A chilling story of the past's influence on the present.   The Twin A Novel Gerbrand Bakker, translated from the Dutch by David Colmer Archipelago: 250 pp., $25 The story is eerily

One day, thinking that he is asleep, Helmer van Wonderen tells his bedridden father the truth about how he feels: “I can’t stand you because you have ruined my life. I don’t call a doctor because I think it is

LIFE ON THE family farm was never all that easy, but lately, for Helmer Van Wonderen, it has become a bittersweet routine enlivened only by a new development: the slow death of his unpleasant old father.   Dad had been a vicious

‘What is the signifiance of the donkeys in your novel?’ With the sigh of an author who’s fielded this and other similar questions many, many times, Gerbrand Bakker gamely replied to his Edinburgh festival inquisitor, ‘If you want the donkeys to

[A] masterpiece. . . . The Hague's greatest writer, turn-of-the-century Louis Couperus . . . captured the city in a famous novel, Eline Vere. . . . For its roomy, chatty descriptions of life among the moneyed classes, it is

The twenty-nine (very) short stories in Sarajevo Marlboro by Miljenko Jergovic (Archipelago Books) are set in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war of the early 1990s, and they fill the gaps in the media coverage during that time and in the historical and