Ten White Geese

A visit from the Queen, a tragic accident, a divided family: a masterful new novel from the prize-winning Gerbrand Bakker.

On a hot summer’s day in June 1969, everyone is gathered to welcome Queen Juliana. The boys and girls wave their flags enthusiastically. But just as the monarch is getting into her car to leave, little Hanne Kaan and her mother arrive late — the Queen strokes the little girl’s cheek and regally offers Anna Kaan her hand.

It would have been an unforgettable day of celebration if only the baker hadn’t been running late with his deliveries and knocked down Hanne, playing on the roadside, with his brand-new VW van.

Years later, Jan Kaan arrives on a hot day in June in order to tidy his sister’s grave, and is overcome again with grief and silent fury. Isn’t it finally time to get to the bottom of things? Should the permit for the grave be extended? And why won’t anyone explain to his little niece Dieke why grandma has been lying up in the hayloft for a day and a half, nursing a bottle of Advocaat and refusing to see anyone?

June

When Henk’s twin brother dies in a car accident, Helmer is obliged to return to the small family farm. He resigns himself to taking over his brother’s role and spending the rest of his days ‘with his head under a cow’.

After his old, worn-out father has been transferred upstairs, Helmer sets about furnishing the rest of the house according to his own minimal preferences. ‘A double bed and a duvet’, advises Ada, who lives next door, with a sly look. Then Riet appears, the woman once engaged to marry his twin. Could Riet and her son live with him for a while, on the farm?

The Twin is an ode to the platteland, the flat and bleak Dutch countryside with its ditches and its cows and its endless grey skies. Ostensibly a novel about the countryside, as seen through the eyes of a farmer, The Twin is, in the end, about the possibility or impossibility of taking life into one’s own hands. It chronicles a way of life which has resisted modernity, is culturally apart, and yet riven with a kind of romantic longing.