What I'd Rather Not Think About
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
What if one half of a pair of twins no longer wants to live? What if the other can’t live without them?
This question lies at the heart of Jente Posthuma’s deceptively simple What I’d Rather Not Think About. The narrator is a twin whose brother has recently taken his own life. She looks back on their childhood, and tells of their adult lives: how her brother tried to find happiness, but lost himself in various men and the Bhagwan movement, though never completely.
In brief, precise vignettes, full of gentle melancholy and surprising humour, Posthuma tells the story of a depressive brother, viewed from the perspective of the sister who both loves and resents her twin, struggles to understand him, and misses him terribly.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Dutch novelist Posthuma returns (after People Without Charisma) with a sharp meditation on grief. The unnamed narrator lost her fraternal twin brother to suicide two years earlier, at 35. The patchworked story of the twins' bond and the brother's fruitless search for meaning is woven with reflections on such historical events as the construction and annihilation of New York City's twin towers, Bernie Madoff's ponzi scheme and his attempted suicide with his wife, and the discovery of Josef Mengele's experiments on twins during the Holocaust. As a young man, the narrator's brother, also unnamed, briefly belonged to the Osho cult and cast about for fulfillment in romantic relationships with men. She reflects on what would have been their 36th birthday: "My brother was the giant and I was a gnome. I was all the gnomes. I was way too much. And still, I hadn't been enough." This bricolage of subjects coheres into a bracing chronicle, showing how the narrator marks the time of her life with her brother. It's an inventive and worthy addition to the ever-swelling genre of grief narratives.
