Posts filed under 'siblings'

Announcing Our July Book Club Selection: What I’d Rather Not Think About by Jente Posthuma

July 27, 2023  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Daljinder Johal

Posthuma develops an affecting novel about grief by embracing its full complexity.

Jente Posthuma’s What I’d Rather Not Think About delves into the closeness of a relationship that many find difficult to understand: the inextricable link between twin siblings. Through a delicately woven tale of memory, shared selfhood, and grief, the author takes us into the mind that struggles to understand a world shattered by loss, when one sibling dies and another is left to reconstitute the fragments. Poetic and surprising, Posthuma shows how even in the most intimate of connections, in another person lies the great unknown.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

What I’d Rather Not Think About by Jente Posthuma. Translated from the Dutch by Sarah Timmer Harvey, Scribe, 2023

In short, poignant vignettes, What I’d Rather Not Think About is Jente Posthuma’s story of twin siblings: a brother who commits suicide, and a sister who is left behind. True to its title, the novel grapples with the narrator’s dark, complicated feelings of loss following the death of her brother, as she ruminates on the intensity of their relationship. In reflections of the siblings’ childhood and youthful dreams, tracing how these dreams changed or were lost on the way to maturity, Posthuma develops an affecting novel about grief by embracing its full complexity.

From its opening passage, Posthuma hints to the darker turn the twins’ story will take; the first memory shared is of the two experimenting with waterboarding as children, after seeing a film about Guantanamo Bay. To this, their mother sighs, accurately guessing that: “this has to be one of your brother’s ideas”. The untraditional game cleverly introduces their relationship, with the brother being more in control of their makeshift experiment, leaving the narrator coughing and spluttering from the experience. She asks her brother: “Why didn’t you help me?”, and only receives a single “sorry” in return. This pattern of behavior continues as adults, such as when the narrator joins her brother in a diving lesson, since “my brother expected me to follow him because that’s what I always did. If I wanted to go in a different direction, he would ignore me and keep walking.” READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: ‘So Long, Adolescence!’ by Réka Mán-Várhegyi

July 17, 2018  |  in Translations  |  by Owen Good and Réka Mán-Várhegyi

We’ll leave our mum and dad behind, we’ll leave their poverty and their slothfulness, their gestures and their misery all behind.

Full of dark humor and vibrant details, today’s Translation Tuesday, by Réka Mán-Várhegyi and translated by Owen Good, shows the inner workings of a Hungarian family. Dealing with obesity, sibling relationships, and emerging sexuality, this gripping story captures that uncomfortably liminal time known as adolescence.

‘It’ll be beach weather at the weekend,’ our mum squeaked. ‘Get your swimming costumes ready, we’re going to the lake. Dad, have you checked the batteries in the cooler bag? Does it still work? We’ll not miss it if we don’t buy a new one. No point in wasting money.’

Panni was staring at her hand. I was counting the strips in the rotting wainscot on the dining room wall. We didn’t put up any protest but we didn’t want to go to the lake and they knew it. We didn’t want to lie in the sun in swimsuits, we didn’t want to soak in the water, and, most of all, we didn’t want to gawp at jet-skis. Every summer, jet-skis tore up and down the puddle-sized lake with pornstar-esque girls and boys on them, our classmates, but at least in school they didn’t shriek all day long.

I was born into a fat, hemorrhoidal family as the younger member of fraternal twins. By our teenage years, Panni and I had turned into sluggish potato sacks, we’d become our own parents one size smaller. Later on it became clear that our features weren’t overly similar, but the differences between us were hidden by the fat, just like our parents. When I was seventeen the spare pounds didn’t hurt so much as the fact that I didn’t have any distinguishing features. After class Panni and I often went to the wood, we sat on our coats at the foot of a tree, smoked a cigarette each and scratched our faces with thorns. We both wanted a proper scar. But these were just pathetic thin scratches. They healed in half a day. Especially on my skin—which was positively brown compared to Panni’s milky white—when I wiped the blood off you couldn’t even see them.

READ MORE…

In Review: Across the China Sea by Gaute Heivoll

September 11, 2017  |  in Reviews  |  by Sam Carter

"Patients and patience quickly become intimately intertwined."

Across the China Sea explores an unconventional family in rural Norway coming together during the weakening German occupation of the country. A review by Asymptote Assistant Managing Editor Sam Carter. 

It begins with the discovery of a contract, but Gaute Heivoll’s Across the China Sea, translated by Nadia Christensen, is ultimately the story of a community that generously insists on inclusion over exclusion. First published in Norwegian in 2013 and recently released by Graywolf in Nadia Christensen’s consistently elegant translation, this novel is Heivoll’s second to appear in English after Before I Burn, a partly autobiographical work that explores an incident of arson. In Across the China Sea, however, loss assumes a rather different form—one less concerned with spectacle and more attuned to the small gestures that often make all the difference.

A young family moves from Oslo to a small town near the coast in order to start anew. They’ve come not to flee the city but to build a better version of something they already understand: an asylum. The parents—both of whom are trained nurses—decide their newly-built house can accommodate more than just biological children. Soon afterward, in addition to caring for three grown men, they take in five siblings the state had taken away from mentally unfit parents. At this new home, the children, who are also variously disabled, live in a fully furnished attic, yet they’re hardly out of sight or mind. They begin to interact with other members of this curious collective, including the narrator and his younger sister—the only two members of the household biologically linked to the nurses.

Bonds, in other words, are not limited by blood, and an early tragedy not only puts that belief to the test but also brings into sharper relief the contours of this unusual community nestled into the Norwegian countryside. Any separation between the groups of children is rendered meaningless at a time when comfort cannot be sought selectively. Indeed, the delicate balance proves resilient enough to deal with another loss that, while only temporary, still takes an emotional toll. Patients and patience quickly become intimately intertwined, exhibiting a link that their etymological affinity can only begin to capture. READ MORE…