Twins

Rating:
Summary: One of the most extrodinary stories
Review: I absolutley loved this book. I have always enjoyed WWII novels so when I noticed this one I was intrigued. This story allows you to see both sides of the war and really feel sympathy for both sides no matter what you beleive, Tessa De Loo created a masterpeice when she wrote this I think it is wonderful book for anyone.

Rating:
Summary: The crippling hold of the past
Review: I received this book for Christmas from a young Dutch woman, who told me it was popular reading in Holland. It came at a time when I despaired that the American book market was ignoring us "mature" readers in their mad rush to publish works by the latest Hot Young Thing, endless tales of angst and coming-of-age in affluent America.

The Twins was a refreshing change. It handles its themes--war and peace, the importance and destructiveness of both real and improvised families, and most of all, forgiveness--with a straightforward deftness that belies their weight. In the stories of its twins, old women orphaned and separated in their youth, it tells by flashback the larger tale of a divided Europe, where the personal and institutional horrors of WWII have left proud neighboring cultures hungry, even today, for rapprochment.

The book's pace is leisurely, but builds nicely on the circumstances and personalities of its two main characters. It is history--not as a list of dry names, dates and military advances, but as a fleshed account of individual and collective circumstance and attitudes. It is a rich, well-written fictional portrait of the political become personal, with a message that rings true more these days than ever about the importance of letting go--not of the past, but of the crippling hold it can have over us, the grip that kills our ability to appreciate the human face behind our stereotypes.

The Twins is an interesting, intelligent, lingering book that can be appreciated by both young and mature readers--the former, for its accounts of young love and idealism, the latter for its depth of experience. I'm glad it's been translated and published here, so American readers have the chance to enjoy its wisdom.

Susan O'Neill, author: Don't Mean Nothing: Short Stories of Viet Nam

Rating:
Summary: An allegory for the response of humanity to war
Review: The previous reviewer gave a good summary of this book, which was strongly recommended to me by an English family member who works in both the Netherlands and Germany. It tells a highly believable,but presumably fictional based on true experiences, account of the pre, war and post war experiences of the two twins reared apart in these two countries. It depicts very well the perceptions, values and interpretations of events which represent the cultural attitudes of these two nations. For me it was a long but compelling read which helped me understand attitudes to WW2 from two intimately involved countries who were in very different situations. Perhaps to know all is to forgive all. I should say that some others who I have recommended it to found it too lengthy, to me WW2 still provides the major moral questions for my generation even though I was born after it.

Rating:
Summary: two sisters, two worlds
Review: The twins gives us the people of the Netherlands and people all over the world a better understanding about the suffering of the average german, during the second world war. Lotte and Anna two sisters born in germany in the interbellum of the two world wars, were separated at the age of six. Lotte goes to the Netherlands because of her illness and Anna stays in Germany to live with her fathers family, who are good catholic farmers. Seventy years later they meet accidentally in a resort in Spa (Belgium),and they have to overcome seventy years of hatered. But not only their own, that is the most beautifull part of the book, it is a metophor for the relations between people of all countries who participated in the second world war. If two sisters who share flesh and blood can not overcome their disputes how can the world...

Rating:
Summary: A rather ordinary book about extraordinary events.
Review: The twins of the title become orphans, are separated, and one grows up Dutch, the other remains German. They have some abortive contacts, and finally meet, by coincidence, as old women taking the baths in SPA, Belgium. Most of the book consists of their account of their lives, with their lives post WWII treated cursorily (well the German goes a few years past the War). The salient point is that the Dutch woman cannot forgive the German for being a German. She does at the end, but the whole account of their interaction in SPA is very weak. De Loo has definite narrative skill, so the book is readable. What I found particularly strange, is that the author seems to go out of her way to make the discovery of the two earlier visits between the two twins surprises to the reader, for no apparent reason, and to the detriment of the integrity of the story.

Rating:
Summary: Talk about it!
Review: The Twins recounts the events in the lives of twin girls, seperated at age 6 following the deaths of their parents. One girl is taken in by the German branch of the family, and the other travels to Holland. They are estranged by nation, by distance and ultimately by time as each girl has a different experience of life both during and after World War 2. They meet years later in a Health Resort and, through the clever use of shared reminisence, both women explore the diversity of their lives and the choices they have made. This book inspired so much discussion in our bookclub that we would be remiss not to recommend it. We talked about the impact of WW2 on Europe, on the allied forces and on the German nation. We talked about the representation of Hitler's charisma throughout the novel and the driving forces behind the tragedy of the war. We were bemused by Lotte's judgemental reaction towards Anna - her desire to deny the German part of her family so strong that she became a difficult character to like. We were saddened by Anna's life story, and horrified by Lotte's lack of reaction to the events happening around her. Even the contrast between Anna's passionate short lived marriage and Lotte's 'may as well' wedding that lasts a lifetime was noted and discussed between our readers. The only criticism of this book that we could muster is that in places it contains untranslated German phrases, making it somewhat disjointed and a little difficult to follow. We put this down to it being a translated text with no glossary, and dug out our high school German Phrasebooks! This book has excellent characterisation, a well handled narrative device and a changing point of view that engages and holds the reader. We highly recommend it for bookclubs everywhere.

Rating:
Summary: Will change your perspective on the world
Review: This is a very unique book and reading it will almost undoubtedly change the way you look at both history and the world today as at times nothing much seems to have really changed. We still judge people on their nationality and judge entire nations on the actions of a minority without even thinking about it but reading this book will make it impossible to continue to do so. At times it puts a little too much effort into explaining how the German people suffered just as much as the people of the occupied countries but I think it's necessary to really prove the point. Even today there are people who paint the picture of the war in complete black and white and see all Germans of the time as Nazi-sympathizers and this book manages to put a much more human and personal face to each side of the war.

The story of the two women being sisters doesn't always work that well - in fact it's not until the last third of the book that it begins to seem real - and there's a bit too much emphasis on Anna but it is still a marvellous and thought-provoking read. I grew up listening to my great-grandmother's stories of the war and the way that she never forgave neither the Germans nor the Russians (and consequently I was 14 years old before I started questioning still laying the guilt at the feet of all Germans and Russians alive today) and I wish that she was alive now so that I could read this book to her. It's strong enough to might even have been able to broaden her perspective and given her some peace of mind. The ending was so sad yet perfect that it gave me goose bumps all over my body.

Rating:
Summary: Emotionally complex, beautifully written
Review: Twin sisters, orphaned and separated at age six, brought up on opposite sides of World War II, meet by chance at a health resort 70 years later in Dutch author Tessa De Loo's absorbing novel of loss, war and moral ambiguity.

Born in Cologne, Germany, Lotte and Anna are inseparable for their first six years, brought up by their consumptive father after the early death of their mother. But when their father dies, Lotte, also suffering from TB, is taken to Holland by Dutch relatives and Anna, the stronger, is sent to her grandfather's pig farm in rural Germany. Lotte's letters are kept from Anna, who is regarded as cheap labor on the farm, and, while the two meet briefly as adults, they remain strangers until thrown together at the spa in Belgium where both have gone for treatment of arthritis.

Anna, always more boisterous and gregarious, pursues a reconciliation with her quieter sister, who is embittered by the war and resistant to all things German. Anna disliked Nazism but went along. When she met and fell in love with a reluctant Austrian soldier, he accepted SS officer training in order to be temporarily close to her. He eventually died in a bombing attack. Lotte fell in love with a Jew who died in a concentration camp. At great risk, her family hid Jews during the war.

But these are the broad outlines of their lives. As they tell each other their stories, the color and shading emerges, painting a vivid, tumultuous, sometimes horrific picture of lives shaped by war. Interwoven with the moods and melancholy of old age, the sisters' narratives begin tentatively. Anna gives hints of the privations she suffered at the pig farm, Lotte recalls a better life with siblings and school and loving parents.

As personal bitterness and long held grudges surface, the anecdotes become pointed, fueled by anger or hurt, or more pensive, plaintive ruminations of deprivation and what might have been. Anna's childhood is revealed as a bleak, loveless time of backbreaking drudgery and humiliation. The local priest offered the only hope and at last was instrumental in extracting her from her relatives, providing an education and finding her work as a servant. Lotte's childhood, while loving, was dominated by a monumentally selfish uncle whose obsession with music inexplicably excluded his niece's beautiful singing voice, which the war then crushed.

As the girls come of age, the world explodes into war. Without hammering the point home, De Loo explores the poignancy of this timing - their first forays into the wider world, into love, independence and responsibility, are hesitant steps into chaos and increasing ugliness.

Nor does De Loo allow the immense, horrific backdrop of war subsume the girls' individuality. The war is all consuming but Lotte and Anna struggle within its confines to grow and love. War batters their youth and shapes their future but at their core, they remain true to their natures.

Anna, yearning for reconciliation, but not one to plead, batters at Lotte's defenses with honest, sometimes painful revelations, charting her course from beaten slave to servant to the rich, to widow, to Red Cross nurse and prisoner-of-war. Anna's exasperation takes the form of scorn for Lotte's easier passage through life and war. Lotte, after all, had parents, a husband, children. Anna, barren from a savage beating in childhood, had only herself.

Lotte, wrapped in righteousness, remains convinced she would have been more resistant to the Nazis. For her, war was a time of bravery and terrible tension - fear of the occupiers, fear of local betrayal, scrambles to hide the refugees whose capture would mean death for them all. As the war went on, hunger loomed almost as large, spurring breathtaking risks for a loaf of bread, a sack of grain.

Back and forth, De Loo engages the emotions of the reader for both her protagonists, involving us in their bickering and the catharsis they both crave. Her prose, beautifully translated from the Dutch by Ruth Levitt, raises unanswerable questions and explores complex ambiguities of identity and blood and choice. Sensitive, intelligent and wholly engaging, "The Twins" grapples with the human cost of war, whatever the side.