Helpful Score: 2
The Twin is about 57-year old Helmer's life on his rural Dutch family dairy farm. Helmer lives the life of a cloistered unindividuated twin, despite the fact that his identical brother Henk died at the age of 19. Rather than focusing on this devastatingly tragic loss, Helmer instead seems to have been more traumatized by his brother's earlier abandoning him for a girl (Riet, who subsequently became his fiancee, and then ultimately was responsible for his accidental death). It's not really made clear what prompted Helmer's decision to move his dying father upstairs and start redecorating the whole house, after 35 years of not making his own mind up to do anything but just doing what everybody else told him to do. It breaks my heart to read that a twin-less twin can never be made whole (especially as a mom of twins) but even after Helmer finds somebody, still the last line of the book is "I am alone".
