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“What if one half of a pair of twins no longer wants to live? What if the other can’t live without them?” asks Jente Posthuma in her International Booker-shortlisted novel What I’d Rather Not Think About, even before one enters its wistful pages. In the story of a faltering relationship between a brother and a sister, nicknamed One and Two, the latter meditates on grief that becomes an inseparable part of life when a loved one dies. It is no secret that One has committed suicide, survived by Two, the sister, and the cats, Three and Four; although to the sister, the abrupt end of her brother’s life remains an inconceivable mystery till the end. She has been and will always be a little ‘less’ than her brother: a few inches shorter, vegetarian when he is vegan, depressed when he is suicidal. The 45-minute gap between the births of the twins seems to never fill, in life or in death. As it often happens when one mourns, Two seeks comfort in the belongings of her brother. She remembers their childhood, their coming-of-age, the trivia contests, college days, and the distance; and copes, as she sifts through those memories for answers to her brother’s death and his days leading up to it. “My brother had gone and with him, all of my past. I came from nothing and was going nowhere,” she says. In perceiving the world through grief-tinted glasses, Two leans on the other tragedies of the world and their perpetrators to trivialise her own pain: the Holocaust and the cruel physician, Josef Mengele, obsessed with conducting experiments on twins; the 9/11 attacks and the destruction of the Twin Towers. Reading about the suicide of artists and celebrities, or about victims of Ponzi schemes, and songs such as ‘Help Me Scrape the Mucus Off My Brain’ (1996) by Ween, bring her an odd comfort, although they do not always seem relevant to the story. Neither does her brother’s brief obsession with Osho’s philosophy (rather his controversial, problematic sermons). Originally published in Dutch in 2020, What I’d Rather Not... is terse yet vivid; written in 140 diary entry-like episodes. The translator, Sarah Timmer Harvey, who learned the language after shifting to the Netherlands at the age of 19, has preserved the life between the sentences. It captures grief as the routine, quotidian thing it becomes, when one loses a family member, and at the same time, secures a balance between melancholy and gloom despite the omnipresence of death. Two is oddly familiar in her anonymity; her muse, comfortingly universal.