{"id":1203,"date":"2026-08-10T14:40:51","date_gmt":"2026-08-10T14:40:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bestbook.hr\/?p=1203"},"modified":"2026-09-03T19:06:37","modified_gmt":"2026-09-03T19:06:37","slug":"the-art-of-leaving-things-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bestbook.hr\/en\/the-art-of-leaving-things-out\/","title":{"rendered":"The art of leaving things out"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

When the Polish writer Andrzej Stasiuk visited Croatia some fifteen years ago, he put forward a couple of extremely interesting ideas. One of them was his comparison between Central European and Western literature: in his view, Central European literature is oriented more toward the world and toward reality itself, whereas Western literature is more self-oriented, and \u201cis in danger of soon devouring itself.\u201d His second claim deserves to be quoted in full: ” For many years under communism we lived in a state of great expectation and longing for the West<\/strong>, which was inaccessible to us and to which we could not travel. While waiting for it, we immersed ourselves deeply in Western culture. We were not there, but we functioned within an imaginary Western world. And when it finally became accessible to us, our interest declined. Today I am bored in the West, be cause I have the feeling that everything I can see there has long since been described and that the West is an exhausted subject. For example, the beautiful harmony of civilization, culture and nature in Tuscany made me feel ill after a week.\u201d In that sense, Stasiuk said he went to the West as a writer, in order to earn some money from writing, but that for him a journey to Albania, for instance, was a far greater intellectual challenge. What lends cred ibility and weight to Stasiuk\u2019s words is the fact that he is a writer whose works are translated in the West and who seems, at least to some extent, immune to literary fame.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Hairdresser\u2019s Son, Gerbrand Bakker, Fraktura. Translation: Romana Pere\u010dinec <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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The cracks in Stasiuk\u2019s theses, with which I largely agreed, were first opened for me \u2013 at least from my own perspective \u2013 by the novel \u201cThe Twin\u201d (\u201cBoven is het stil \u2013 It Is Quiet Up There\u201d, in literal translation) by the Dutch writer Gerbrand Bakker, which I read a few years after that interview with Stasiuk. It is a great novel that doesn\u2019t practically speak about anything in particular. Bakker, or so it seemed to me, with his unpretentiousness and minimalism, actually restored a shaken faith in the power of literature as an aesthetic category. (In the meantime, the mythical West has changed completely and, I would say, irreversibly. Instead of Stasiuk\u2019s \u201cbeautiful harmony of civilization, culture and nature,\u201d<\/strong> we are now watching footage from Ukraine, Gaza, Iran… The Kunder ian unbearable lightness with which the West today relativizes the deaths of more than a hundred Iranian schoolgirls, while Gaza and the tragedy of the Palestinian people have turned into a field of cheap and shallow activism, to cite just the two most recent examples, freezes the blood somewhat through its callousness. As a result, European literature should no longer be \u201cboring,\u201d which makes Stasiuk\u2019s theses somewhat collapse.) Where, then, do the roots of Bakker\u2019s minimalism lie? Bakker, who is by profession a licensed gardener, claims that writing and gardening are compatible. This seductive thesis can also be applied to his work, which seems to me to consist of carefully removing excess, of pulling up the \u201cweeds.\u201d \u201cThose two things work well together. In autumn, when I rake dead leaves, I can do it for hours \u2013 once I even disturbed the pile I had already made just so I could go on raking. The sound is so wonderful: it lets you think subconsciously, in the subconscious,\u201d he once said. Another detail from Bakker\u2019s biography confirms this thesis. Before publishing \u201cThe Twin\u201d, Bakker did various precarious jobs. Among other things, he wrote subtitles for the American soap opera \u201cThe Bold and the Beautiful\u201d, shown on Dutch television. He described that experience as follows: \u201cThey chatter and chatter, but you only have seven seconds for a subtitle on the screen. That\u2019s what \u2018The Bold and the Beautiful\u2019<\/strong> taught me. It taught me to leave things out.\u201d Such an approach irresistibly recalls the practice of the American minimalists, such as Raymond Carver, who had a scrap of paper pinned to the wall in front of his desk that read: \u201cNo tricks.\u201d \u201cWriters don\u2019t need tricks and gimmicks<\/strong>, nor even the basic need to be the smartest person in the world. When he senses he may be in danger of seeming foolish, a writer should from time to time be able to stop and look at something \u2013 a sunset, an old shoe \u2013 with a sense of absolute wonder,\u201d Carver wrote in his poetics-inflected book \u201cFires\u201d. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Bakker\u2019s novels can also be seen as a somewhat uncanny variant of Dutch magical realism (Photo: Fraktura)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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Born in 1962, the Dutch writer Gerbrand Bakker became internationally recognized af ter his debut novel \u201cThe Twin\u201d received the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2010, the richest international prize for an individual work of fiction in the world, worth 100,000 euros. The prize is unique also because public libraries around the world nomi nate titles they believe should win. It is equally important to mention the courage of the jury, which year after year has discovered great new names in world literature. \u201cThe Twin\u201d, for example, was the third consecutive debut novel to win the award, after \u201cMan Gone Down\u201d by the American writer Michael Thomas and \u201cDe Niro\u2019s Game\u201d by the Lebanese writ er Rawi Hage. Bakker\u2019s novel, published in English under the title \u201cThe Twin\u201d, was nominated by libraries in Amsterdam, The Hague, Utrecht and Eindhoven. In its citation, the jury described Bakker\u2019s minimalism as \u201cquiet mastery\u201d<\/strong>: \u201cWith quiet mastery the story draws the reader in. The writing is beautiful: restrained and lucid, yet full of the details of rural rhythms in the cold, damp Dutch land scape.\u201d Three of Bakker\u2019s novels are available in Croatian transla tion: \u201cGore je tiho\u201d (\u201cThe Twin\u201d), \u201cObilazak\u201d (\u201cThe Detour\u201d), and, most recently, \u201cFrizerov sin\u201d (\u201cThe Hairdresser\u2019s Son\u201d)<\/strong>, published last year. All three were published by Fraktura; the first two were trans lated by Maja Weikert, and \u201cThe Hairdresser\u2019s Son\u201d by Romana Pere\u010dinec. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Twin, Gerbrand Bakker, Fraktura. Translation: Maja Weikert<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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Bakker got the idea for \u201cThe Twin\u201d in 2002 while on holiday in Corsica. He was thinking about a son who might \u201cdo something terrible to his father.\u201d Four years passed between that initial idea and the final version of the novel. By his own account, Bakker was frustrated because for a long time he could not move beyond the novel\u2019s basic premise. \u201cFor months it stayed in my head and I was so frustrated \u2013 nothing happened with that idea. Then I simply sat down and started writing. I didn\u2019t know where I was going, I just began \u2013 for me that is a good way of writing,\u201d he said. \u201cThe Twin\u201d deals with themes such as loneliness and isolation in the con temporary world<\/strong>. An important strand of the novel is also its treatment of a deeply rooted sense of duty. The novel\u2019s protag onist and narrator is Helmer van Wonderen, who, some thirty years earlier, had been forced to return from university, where he had been studying literature, to the family farm in a desolate Dutch village, a place where time seems to have stopped, after his twin brother Henk was killed in a traffic accident. \u201cHenk and I were born in 1947, I am a few minutes older. At first, they thought we wouldn\u2019t survive the next day (24 May), but Mother never stopped believing in us. \u2018Women are made for twins,\u2019 she supposedly said when she first breastfed us. I don\u2019t believe that; it sounds more like one of those remarks that emerges from a larger cluster of events and statements \u2013 much was said at the time, of course \u2013 and over time survives on its own, detached from context, most likely a distortion of something Father or the doctor said. Mother herself probably said very little.\u201d At one point in the novel, Helmer has a framed map of Denmark hanging on his wall, a country that for him represents a place of escape from his bleak and predictable everyday life: \u201cI went out into the pasture to count the sheep<\/strong>. Whenever I see a sheep, I am always a little depressed. They are such mournful animals. I often think of the three sheep I sold in order to buy the map of Denmark, above all because I never even looked to see which three sheep I was selling. (…) I think of Denmark while holding the other part in my hands as I go down the stairs.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Detour, Gerbrand Bakker, Fraktura. Translation: Maja Weikert <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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Helmer lives on the farm with his stern and authoritarian father, his mother having died a few years after his brother. The relationship between father and son<\/strong> is cold and tense, since Helmer has always believed that his father loved his brother more \u2013 the brother who was meant to inherit the farm. Helmer never married and remained tied to the farm all those years, milking dairy cows twice a day, every day, for decades. His dying father lies upstairs in the family house: the \u201cup there\u201d of the original title refers to the room where Helmer\u2019s father is dying. Helmer encounters the former girlfriend of his twin brother, who asks him to help care for her teenage son \u2013 also named Henk \u2013 who, unlike Helmer, is carefree and without any sense of responsibility. The unexpected arrival of a third person in the house changes things and forces Helmer to think about his relationship with his father and his dead brother, and also about his own future once his father dies. At the end of the novel, after his father\u2019s death, Helmer, attempting both to escape from himself and to give meaning to his life, goes to Denmark. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The defining feature of \u201cThe Detour\u201d, published in Croatia in 2016, is, as in \u201cThe Twin\u201d, its minimalism and its lethally slow yet perfectly controlled pace. But those are not the only points of contact between the two novels. \u201cThe Detour\u201d is likewise a story about loneliness,<\/strong> set in an empty landscape, in the timeless world of rural Wales. The novel\u2019s protagonist and narrator is a middle-aged wom an who introduces herself as Emilie, though that is not her real name. Emilie has fled the Netherlands, and Amsterdam, where she lost her position as a university lecturer after an affair with a student, once anonymous messages were left around the university calling her a \u201cheartless bitch\u201d who had seduced a first-year student. Emilie was ac tually on her way to Ireland. Yet on the road there she stops in north western Wales, rents a cottage, and stays. By Bakker\u2019s own admission, \u201cThe Detour\u201d grew out of a \u201cvery depressive\u201d period in his life: \u201cI write instinctively. Something wants to come out. Only now do I see that this book is terribly much about myself. I write from the subconscious. I don\u2019t see what I am doing.\u201d The name Emilie was borrowed by the nar rator from the poet Emily Dickinson, whose portrait and collected poems she brought with her from Amsterdam. On the isolated rural property she is accompanied only by ten white geese, which mysteriously disappear one by one<\/strong>, further feeding Emilie\u2019s fear and uncertainty. (The American translation of the novel was in fact titled after this motif: \u201cTen White Geese\u201d.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Even though Europe has changed beyond recognition from 2006, when \u201cThe Twin\u201d was published, to Bakker\u2019s most recent translated novel \u201cThe Hairdresser\u2019s Son\u201d, originally published in 2023, the literary world of Gerbrand Bakker remains the same. His characters seem to live in a parallel world, one barely touched, if at all, by the echoes of the reality in which they live. The protagonist of the new novel is Simon, a forty-year-old hairdresser who has continued his father\u2019s trade and is obsessively seeking the answer to a question that has tormented him all his life, connected with the disappearance of his father Cornelis, who, before Simon was born, secretly packed his things and abandoned his wife and unborn son. When, in the terrible plane disaster of 1977, when two passenger jets collided at Tenerife airport, almost all the passengers died, Simon\u2019s father was listed among the dead. More than forty years later, Simon, who works as a hairdresser just like the father he never knew, is finally ready to confront the trauma of his father\u2019s disappearance. His mother never spoke to him either about their marriage or about Cornelis, but she never remarried or had another partner either, and Si mon has spent his entire life sensing that something was being hidden from him. Why did his father secret ly leave on that journey? Why did he abandon his wife and unborn child? The body was never identified. Was he really on that plane? Alongside the search for his father, Simon lives a dull and monoto nous life, drinking large quantities of espresso and changing casual lovers, among them the Writer, a middle-aged, unsuccessful author<\/strong> through whom Bakker also comments on the literary world. The Writer\u2019s greatest achievement in life is a panel discussion on which he once appeared alongside the con temporary German author Daniel Kehlmann, who, according to him, \u201cwas a disappointment.\u201d The Writer also speaks ironically about a literary appearance in Marseille, saying that he had travelled almost a thousand kilometres to speak in front of eleven people \u2013 or maybe twelve, he is no longer sure. This novel too, like the previous two, has that deadly slow but finely adjusted rhythm<\/strong>, though in \u201cThe Hairdresser\u2019s Son\u201d it does accelerate some what in the second half. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Besides their recognizable style, Bakker\u2019s novels share a number of recurring motifs, the most important of which is the attempt by middle-aged characters to escape their dull and monotonous lives. Helmer from \u201cThe Twin\u201d leaves the farm after his father\u2019s death and departs for Den mark; Emilie from \u201cThe Detour\u201d flees Amsterdam for \u201cmythical\u201d Ireland, only to strand herself fatally on the picturesque coast of northwestern Wales; Simon\u2019s search for his father is, for him, also a kind of escape from reality and a search for meaning in his own life. The visible lack of emotion in all these char acters is another hallmark of Bakker\u2019s fiction, one that at times creates an almost eerie atmosphere \u2013 as, for example, in \u201cThe Twin\u201d, when Helmer describes in almost documentary fashion, and without any emotional engagement, how his sadistic father kills kittens on the farm. About his mother he writes, in a somewhat Camus-like tone: \u201cMother was an outrageously ugly woman<\/strong>. To some one who didn\u2019t know her, the photograph on the mantelpiece above the fireplace is probably funny: a bony peasant woman with bulging eyes and the hairstyle of a woman who goes to the hairdresser once every four months and is doing her utmost to strike an elegant pose. I do not laugh at the pho tograph. She is my mother. But I used to wonder why Father \u2013 who, when he is not asleep, is almost certainly staring at his attractive self in photographs from long-gone days \u2013 married her. Or no, now that I have been looking at her picture for some time and thinking about the man upstairs, I wonder why she married him.\u201d In \u201cThe Hairdresser\u2019s Son\u201d, Bakker describes the relationship between Simon and the Writer as one almost entirely devoid of emotional connection, while Simon\u2019s homosexuality is not emphasized at any point, as is so often the case in novels that deal with homosexual identity. In truth, all of Bakker\u2019s protagonists are connected by a cold, almost uncan ny estrangement, through which Bakker, in his own way, speaks about Europe \u2013 a Europe that, it seems to me, does not differ in the slightest from our own perception of Europe today. If that is so, Bakker\u2019s novels also possess a certain allegorical quality, and one might even see them as a strange variation on Dutch magical realism. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When the Polish writer Andrzej Stasiuk visited Croatia some fifteen years ago, he put forward a couple of extremely interesting ideas. One of them was his comparison between Central European and Western literature: in his view, Central European literature is oriented more toward the world and toward reality itself, whereas Western literature is more self-oriented, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3237,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,19],"tags":[127,170],"class_list":["post-1203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-literature","tag-fraktura","tag-gerbrand-bakker"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe art of leaving things out - BestBook<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/bestbook.hr\/en\/the-art-of-leaving-things-out\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The art of leaving things out - BestBook\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"When the Polish writer Andrzej Stasiuk visited Croatia some fifteen years ago, he put forward a couple of extremely interesting ideas. 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