When I read the first line of the blurb to What I’d Rather Not Think About by Jente Posthuma, I laughed –

By my twenty-seventh birthday, I owned 142 sweaters, and it was high time I saw a therapist.

And then I stopped laughing, because the next bit of the blurb read –

What if one half of a pair of twins no longer wants to live? What if the other can’t live without them?

Told in vignettes, the unnamed narrator recounts her relationship with her twin brother and how it shifted over time. In the beginning, she saw them forever as a duo, discussing their ‘…future as if it were a joint project we had yet to begin.’ But her brother’s mental health is fragile, and although we we learn of his death early in the book, the focus is on why and when.

With each vignette (some are just a paragraph long), the narrator examines her relationship with her brother, desperate to identify where, in their early adulthood, their paths diverged. The more effort she puts in to resurrecting their childhood closeness, the more her brother pulls away.

My brother’s short silences were something I only experienced later. Much later, when he was keeping me at a distance and I was thinking about him a lot. I replayed our conversations in my mind all the time and noticed his occasional silences… I used to get snappy when I was feeling down but I always assumed he’d tell me if something upset him. And I also thought: Even if you have no one else, you’ll always have your brother.

Posthuma focuses on some interesting themes to highlight the differences between twins, specifically the Twin Towers in New York (and Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk between the towers); Josef Mengele’s horrific experimentation on twins at Auschwitz; and her and her brother’s shared love of the TV show, Survivor.

My brother’s life was a series of poor Survivor decisions but the stupidest thing he did was break his alliance with the only other contestant he could trust, the one who would have given him her last grains of rice, who would have carried him on her back to the finish line if it came to that.

The role of the sweaters still alludes me, short of saying that their number seemed to increase as the narrator’s anxiety about her brother increased. There are certainly well-drawn descriptions of the neat piles of sweaters around the narrator’s apartment, which gives visual evidence of her mounting anxiety.

Posthuma’s writing is striking in its simplicity. The humour is dark, and revealed through the dialogue. When you notice brevity and humour in translated works, it makes me think that the translator – in this case, Sarah Timmer Harvey – has done an excellent job.

One advantage of loss is that you get to put it behind you. You’ve lost, so you can breathe again.

Lastly, this is not in-your-face grief-lit. The vignette format eases the intensity. And yet, it still manages to highlight the guilt and questions and wondering that so frequently accompanies suicide.

I’d spoken too much and failed to understand his silences in time.

4/5

He gave me shopping lists and I bought coriander, coconut milk and lemongrass for a Thai curry that needed to taste the same as the curry he once had at a vegan restaurant he’d been to with Marcel. He never spoke about Marcel anymore but did talk about that curry. He’d never tasted anything quite so delicious.

As part of the 20 Books of Summer reading challenge, I’m comparing the Belfast summer and Melburnian winter. The results for the day I finished this book (June 24): Belfast 15°-20° and Melbourne 4°-18°.