AMONG THE literary luminaries gracing this year’s Cúirt festival is Dutch author Gerbrand Bakker, winner of last year’s IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for his novel The Twin.
Described in the IMPAC award citation as “a stunning and compelling study of unlocked grief and frozen hate”, The Twin’s central character is farmer Helmer van Wonderen.
For 40 years he has lived a stalled, frustrated, life, with every decision on the farm being made by his father. His father is now dying, and the shift in power between the two men sets off great changes.
Helmer moves the old man upstairs. Is this indifference, coldness, or Helmer’s first chance at revenge for what has been an unlived life? To quote again from the IMPAC citation; “The book convinces from first page to last. With quiet mastery the story draws in the reader. The writing is wonderful: restrained and clear, and studded with detail of farm rhythms in the cold, damp Dutch countryside. The author excels at dialogue, and Helmer’s inner story-telling voice also comes over perfectly as he begins to change everything around him.”
Gerbrand Bakker was born in 1962 and studied Dutch historical linguistics and worked as a subtitler for nature films before becoming a gardener. His previous books included an etymological dictionary for children and the young-adult novel Pear Trees Blossom White, which was published in English by New Island Books in 1999.
The Twin appeared in Dutch in 2006 and was awarded the Golden Dog-Ear prize for the best-selling literary debut in The Netherlands. Its subsequent international success nevertheless came as something of a surprise as Bakker admits over an afternoon phone conversation.
“It was at the bookfair in Frankfurt in 2006, something happened and a lot of foreign publishers came running to the stand,” he said. “There was some unexplained hype about the book.”
When the novel won the IMPAC award, Bakker came to Dublin for the prize-giving ceremony and raised a few eyebrows when, instead of the customary acceptance speech, he played the Dutch entry to the 1994 Eurovision Song Contest.
He also gave an interview to The Irish Times’s Eileen Battersby, which he recalls with wry humour; “She keeps horses so she said she couldn’t meet up in Dublin. My translator David Colmer and I had to travel to where she lives. When we met up she and David really got on and they did nearly all the talking as I just sat there. But she still wrote a very nice article!”
The Twin was not Bakker’s first book, but it was the first to achieve real success.
“I have been trying to write novels in earnest since 1992,” he reveals. “I tried to write stories set in Amsterdam but that failed. The Twin came about by accident, I was just writing off the top of my head about what I know from my own past.
“I’m a farmer’s son and in that book I was homing into my own experiences and the landscape I grew up in, what in German would be called my ‘heimat’. I found it was what I could write about. I need nature and animals to be able to write a novel.
“I don’t have a lot of opinions. Other writers people are more opinionated but I am just happy to write about gardens and animals and nature. I am more into atmosphere.”
Some readers have likened Bakker to The Twin’s central character Helmer; it’s an identification that he partly agrees with.
“I quite liked everyone in the novel but Helmer is probably me, that’s something you can’t avoid,” he says. “I remember when I was doing readings from the book some people left because they were disappointed I wasn’t as much like Helmer as they expected! I was making jokes and so on at the reading which Helmer wouldn’t have done.”
Bakker’s latest novel is called The Detour and, intriguingly for a writer from the flatlands of Holland, it’s set amid the mountainous milieu of north Wales. Bakker explains how he came to set the novel there.
“The Twin is all about a father,” he says. “In my novel June there is an old mother who puts herself upstairs, so I felt it was time to move on. I know this part of Wales, I’ve been there often, I love the country, it speaks to me.
“I first visited Wales when I walked along Offa’s Dyke in the 1980s. After that a friend of mine got a job in Bangor in Caernarvon and I often visited. If you come to a new country it can speak to you immediately.
“I wanted to write about it and something just came together. Maybe it is because the landscape in Holland is bleak, flat, and open. I have been to other mountainous regions in Europe and Africa but I think Mount Snowdon is beautiful.”
The Detour has been nominated for the Libris Literatuurprijs, Holland’s equivalent of the Booker Prize. It is due to be published in English later this year.
Gerbrand Bakker, along with Nigeria’s EC Osondu will be reading at Cúirt on Thursday April 14t at 8.30pm in the Town Hall Theatre. Tickets are available on 091 - 569777 and www.tht.ie
