What I'd Rather Not Think About

July 10, 2023
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.