This short novel is narrated by an unnamed young woman who has a twin sibling born 45 minutes before she was, but treats her as a younger sister, who he casually refers to as Two. Both twins suffered from a difficult childhood, due to emotionally distant parents that provided for them financially but not spiritually, and that combined with the older twin's difficulty fitting in throughout his school years and his early adulthood led him to have frequent thoughts of suicide, while pushing away his sister, the only person who loved him unconditionally and completely. His sister bore her own emotional trauma from her childhood years, but she wanted nothing more than her brother to live, and to be happy doing so, but her brother found her repeated efforts to help him to be suffocating and crippling.

Each of the twins had unusual fascinations, with the reality television show Survivor, with the infamous Nazi physician Josef Mengele, the "Angel of Death" who performed experiments on the first born of pairs of twins, and survivors of concentration camps, even though none of their relatives were even in any.

The novel consists of very short snapshots, some as short as a sentence or two, which provide a glimpse into each twin in a nonlinear fashion, both during the childhood and young adulthood, his suicide, and how deeply his sister's life was affected, years after her brother died of suicide.

'What I'd Rather Not Think About' is a tragic story, in which the superhuman efforts of one sibling to save the life of another proves fruitless, but it is also filled with small segments of wry humor that keep it from being a morbidly depressing one. Unlike The Details' I found this novel to be a worthy choice for this year's International Booker Prize. ( )

3.5 stars

A woman thinks about her late twin brother and their relationships--with each other, with their mother, with their significant others, with themselves. She contemplates his bouts of depression, his struggles, his times of neediness and months away. And she grieves.

There is actually a lot of details here, almost too much thrown together, yet it also makes these characters feel like real people. From sweaters to wood carving to discussions about various seasons of Survivor--nearly everyone here has something they love and stick with through the years. ( )

Een jonge vrouw die een tweelingbroer heeft, heeft veel steun aan haar broer en ze zijn van plan op hun 28e samen naar New York te verhuizen, maar dan wil hij dat plotseling niet meer en neemt afstand van haar ( )