Gerbrand bakker biography of martin

The Twin, by Gerbrand Bakker, is entitled Là-haut, Tout estCalme in France and Oben ist es Still in Germany.  Translating these gives a different and more interesting slant to the story immediately:  Yonder/Over There, All is Calm in French; and, more intriguing in German, it translates as On the Surface All is Still, but Oben also means ‘upstairs’; ‘above’; ‘overhead’ and even ‘up north’ – all of which have resonance in the novel. Discovering this, I wondered whether there are also these multiple meanings in the original Dutch but using Google Translate on Boven is het stil offers only a rather clumsy Upstairs is the Quiet which I would then render as It’s Quiet Upstairs.  Having read the book, I prefer On the Surface All is Still as a title rather than The Twin…

While the missing twin is integral to the story, the alternative titles better suit my interpretation of this most thought-provoking book, which won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, 2010. (Click here to read the citation.)  It took longer than I expected to read it, because (as the cover design so cunningly suggests) it encourages reflection.  The first paragraph deftly conveys this sense of powerful emotions beneath the surface:

I’ve put Father upstairs.  I had to park him on a chair first to take the bed apart. He sat there like a calf that’s just a couple of minutes old, before it’s been licked clean: with a directionless, wobbly head and eyes that drift over things.  I ripped off the blankets, sheets and undersheet, leant the mattress and bed boards against the wall, and unscrewed the sides of the bed.  I tried to breathe through my mouth as much as possible.  I’d already cleared out the upstairs room – my room.

‘What are you doing?’ he asked.
‘You’re moving.’ I said.
‘I want to stay here.’
‘No.’ (p3

Getting lost appears to be a major theme in European literature. From Odysseus’ long detour home, to Dante’s midlife crisis in the selva oscura, to the abandoned children of the Brothers Grimm, it would seem that the “straight way” is rarely the best way to make an interesting story. “As you set out on the way to Ithaca,” C.P. Cavafy wrote, offering advice to both storytellers and ordinary folk, “hope that the road is a long one,/filled with adventures, filled with discoveries. The Laestrygonians and the Cyclopes,/Poseidon in his anger: do not fear them.”

The woman who calls herself “Emilie” in the Dutch writer Gerbrand Bakker’s evocative and unsettling short novel Ten White Geese has gone astray in various ways. Her disorientation is both geographical and psychological; it may also turn out to be, as we increasingly suspect, fatal. After an affair with one of her first-year students, she has left her teaching position, as a lecturer in “translation studies,” and her husband in Amsterdam to hole up secretly—with her “books, quite a bit of bedding,” and a single mattress—on an unkempt rural farm in Wales, with an occasional view of the distant sea “over the tops of the now almost leafless trees” in one direction and Mount Snowdon in another.

Emilie—the name she’s assumed in Wales to preserve her anonymity—has made a decisive detour in her life (the Dutch title of the novel is De Omweg, “The Detour”). She seems to have chosen Wales as a secluded place sealed off from urban Amsterdam, and because she speaks excellent English, a language that figures in her professional work as a translator of poetry. And yet she can’t quite tell, as she contemplates “the path you could find only by looking into the distance,” where she stands in her small adopted world. Her new neighbo

The power and endurance of fairy tales derive from their episodes of danger and injustice being resolved through satisfying endings. To arrive at those endings – and sometimes within those endings – there is often a surprising amount of violence and cruelty. The potential of the classic formula to endure while being recreated was recognised by Angela Carter and it is well used too in Boy with A Black Rooster by Stefanie vor Schulte, translated from German by Alexandra Roesch (The Indigo Press, 192pp, £12.99).

The adventure commences with Martin, a young orphan with an ever-present pet rooster, looking on as three men bumble their attempts to locate the key to a small church, to allow a painter who has been commissioned to paint a mural to gain admittance. Through his role in developing a mystical solution to the problem, Martin begins a friendship with the painter that will soon see them leave together but not before Martin has witnessed the snatching of a young girl by a man on a horse and feels a depth of feeling for a girl called Franzi.

Many mishaps and much endangerment will occur before the easily predicted ending will be reached. But it is a thoroughly entertaining story, even allowing for the shortcomings. Much more could have been made of the rooster’s ability to speak, for example, and the translation falters occasionally. But the Bruegel-like medieval setting and the Jacque le fataliste-like insouciance in the face of violence and hardship give the tale a feeling of warmth, despite everything.

A similar feeling of benevolence pervades Goodnight Tokyo by Atsuhiro Yoshida, translated from Japanese by Haydn Trowell (Europa Editions, 174pp, £14.99), though in a very different setting. Each linked episode takes place between 1am and 4.30am in the suburbs and side streets of the city, with characte