After a shaggy-dog story down in South America, we’re off to Europe for the next leg of our International Booker Prize journey, where we’ll be getting involved in a family drama. Relationships between siblings can often be close, but that’s especially true for twins. The downside to this, of course, is when things go wrong, or when one twin is out of the picture, meaning the other has to work out how to move on, alone…
*****
What I’d Rather Not Think About by Jenthe Posthuma
– Scribe Publications, translated by Sarah Timmer Harvey
(review copy courtesy of the publisher)
What’s it all about?
Posthuma’s novel is a first-person narrative told in fragments, taking us back and forth in time, with the focus on the relationship between the narrator and her twin brother. The pair were born just minutes apart, but they turn out to be very different people:
My brother was more active, talked louder and threw bigger tantrums than I did. He hurled things, slammed doors and kicked holes in them. After these fits, he would lock himself in his room and when he eventually came back downstairs, he’d act as if nothing had happened. All my parents needed to do was watch him and occasionally repair something. They were forced to give me their attention. I insisted they comfort me whenever I was upset and refused to let their gaze wander to the newspaper or television. This was back when I still wore my feelings on the outside, like a coat, and didn’t understand that this wasn’t something you were supposed to do.
p.9 (Scribe Publications, 2023)
Understandably, however, the siblings are very close, remaining an integral part of each other’s life, even as adults.
From the start, though, we’re made aware that all this has changed as we learn of the brother’s suicide. Devastated by her loss, the sister is now left to get by without him, and finds herself floundering. What follows is therapy, both literal and metaphorical, as she writes about what she had, and has now lost, wondering whether she’ll ever come through the darkness she finds herself in.
What I’d Rather Not Think About is a novel about a very special bond, and losing it. It’s a rather confessional work, with the short sections lending it the feel of a diary at times. There are sections in which the woman remembers her childhood, dwelling on shared memories, and the picture we’re shown is of inseparable siblings, connected by more than just a birthday.
However, what also comes through in the narrator’s texts is how the two slowly drift apart. Once they’ve grown up, they both move to Amsterdam (living on opposite sides of the same park), but they lead different lives, with the brother beginning to seek distance:
I don’t need my own life, I said.
You just don’t want to live on your own, said my brother.
But that wasn’t it. I did want to live on my own, just with my brother. (p.40)
The sister is unable, unwilling, to accept this change, but she slowly comes to realise it’s not just her he’s turning his back on.
Her therapy is a major part of the book. In her sessions with Elza, she attempts to work through her feelings, and her relationship with her brother. Once he’s gone, the focus is on coping with life after loss:
In When Women Are Friends, the play by Hannah van Wieringen, one of the two characters said there weren’t enough stories about how to deal with life after loss. For example, I know everything about how a mother could murder her children, she said, but nothing about what happens afterwards, in other words, how life continues, how people manage to get through it together. When this is the thing we’re more likely to experience. Technically, there are more Tuesday afternoons where nothing really happens. In a person’s life, I mean. (p.152)
As she struggles to live through these times, she pushes away the one person who might be able to help her, her partner Leo. Having lost her best friend, she’s at risk of isolating herself further by refusing to allow the man in her life to share her grief.
Among the stories of the siblings in her texts, there are certain recurring themes. One is New York, a city to which the narrator pays an extended visit, feeding her obsession with the World Trade Center. She stops by the memorial at the twin towers and reads a book on the tightrope artist who walked between them, long before they were destroyed. There are also several mentions of Auschwitz, Joseph Mengele in particular, with one rather gory fascination being his experiments on twins.
Yet the book is less about the external and more about the internal. We learn of the woman’s coping mechanisms (her sweater collection, her brother, therapy), which don’t always work. In fact, there’s a sense her issues stem from long before her brother’s death, with his disappearance just another issue she has to work through.
It’s all nicely done, with good work by Timmer Harvey, a sensitive look at what happens when the unthinkable occurs. What I’d Rather Not Think About is a novel exploring the close relationship between twins and the difficulty of facing up to mental illness. As the narrator learns, there’s always a reason to carry on, even when it seems as if your world has ended…
Does it deserve to make the shortlist?
In another year, I wouldn’t be overly confident of its chances, but I’m not getting a sense of this being a stellar longlist, and I appreciated this one more than I expected. It’s certainly well-written, and I enjoyed the style of a collection of fragments, vignettes taking us back and forth. As a result, I suspect it will just about sneak into my top six.
Will it make the shortlist?
This one seems to be made for the IBP: not too short, not too long, not too disturbing and just complex enough to lift it above mainstream fare. I’d almost be more surprised *not* to see it shortlisted, to be honest…
*****
In another example of bad planning, one intercontinental flight follows another, as we bid farewell to our bereaved Dutch twin and make our way back to South America, this time landing in Peru. Confusingly, though, we’ll also find ourselves in Europe for some of the journey, as we make the acquaintance of a woman with a famous ancestor and a few life problems to sort out. Join me next time for a few trips to museums, and more besides 
