The Twins [Hardcover]

Tessa De Loo (Author), Ruth Levitt (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1, 2000

Twins who were orphaned at six and sent to live with different relatives on opposite sides of WW II are reunited by chance seventy years later at a Belgian health resort. This international bestseller, a powerful novel, is both a European allegory and a poignant story of family ties.

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Historical and human perspectives clash in this cool, compassionate psychological novel centered around the 1990 chance meeting of two elderly women at Spa, the Belgian health resort. Each woman has come for the famously curative waters. But not by chance does each suffer from debilitating arthritis. The women are twins, separated in childhood by the death of their parents. Anna stays in their native Germany, while Lotte is taken in by relatives in the Netherlands. Consequently, they lose touch with each other and live through the rise of Hitler, the Second World War and the postwar era from opposed positions. The clanking machinery of young Dutch novelist de Loo's premise is at first off-putting, yet in the end she offers a novel of considerable substanceAone that is historically acute and richly imaginative. Lotte despises the Germans and feels disconnected from them, believing that in her sister's place she would have acted differently, since her husband was a Dutch Jew. Anna, meanwhile, though certainly a good woman who harbors only feelings of contempt for the Nazis, married an SS officer from Vienna. What was the degree of her complicity in Nazi horrors? Both sisters lost their husbands in the war, one to random Allied bombing, the other to an Austrian concentration camp. The narrative unfolds through a series of often thorny conversations, as the sisters probe these and other points of contention. De Loo artfully weaves two fully developed fictional personalities into an expertly realized historical background. Overarching questions of guilt and complicity, of good and bad luck, remain unresolved, but the novel subtly illuminates the ambiguities of national identity and family love.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Originally published in the Netherlands in 1993, De Loo!s first novel to be translated into English explores the enmity that existed between Germans and the rest of Europe after World War II. This moving tale addresses notions of guilt and responsibility in a sensitive, thought-provoking manner, without exonerating or condemning. Twins Anna and Lotte Bamberg are born in Cologne but orphaned and separated when they are five. While Lotte is taken in by Dutch relatives, Anna is raised by her grandfather in rural poverty. With the advent of war, their lives take very different turns: Lotte!s family hides an assortment of refugees, while Anna finds love with a soldier of the Reich. Besides two unsuccessful brief meetings, they have no contact until a chance encounter in the Belgian resort town of Spa about 40 years after the war. Anna is eager to reestablish their relationship, yet Lotte is more reluctant. As she gradually comes to understand that not all is black and white, she is able to find her sister again. While some may sense (and resent) an apologist tone to the novel, readers are asked to look deeply into themselves and others before making blanket judgments. Highly recommended for academic and public libraries."David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, FL
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Soho Press (August 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1569472009
• ISBN-13: 978-1569472002
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.4 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,155,138 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Emotionally complex, beautifully written, August 21, 2000

By 

Lynn Harnett (Marathon, FL USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Twins (Hardcover)

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.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the most extrodinary stories, June 15, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: The Twins (Paperback)

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.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The crippling hold of the past, January 19, 2005

By 

Susan O'Neill (Andover, MA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Twins (Paperback)

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