'When my father died, I seemed serene. Later it turned out I was very angry.'

Auke Hulst (1975) grew up more or less unaccompanied by adults with a brother and two sisters in the hamlet of Denmark in Groningen, on top of the Slochteren gas bubble. His childhood in a Pippi Longstocking house in a forest was the model for his third novel Children of the Rough Country (2012). And I remember Titus Broederland is his fifth novel and is about children struggling to survive without parental control in a hostile world.

Excerpts from the podcast:

You had a rather special childhood. As children, you more or less had to raise each other.
Auke Hulst: 'My father died very young when I was seven and my mother was totally unfit for responsibility.'

'We got our education through my parents' cultural baggage. There was a bookcase in the house with good books, there was a piano and there was a nice jazz collection. Everything was possible there, because no one said something couldn't be done.'

That sounds very adventurous, but it also seems very unsafe to me.
'There goes Children of the rough country about, the adventurousness of the situation but also the insecure attachment. People who themselves had a neat and tad strict childhood are a little envious of that free. But people who also grew up in an unsafe situation can hardly handle the book. It pokes at all their sensitivities.'

This novel And I remember Titus Broederland is about identical twins, the unnamed I-figure and his brother Titus who grow up in a remote forest, with an often absent father and no mother. They are seen as devil's children by the very religious outside world. Why did you want it to be about identical twins?
'It is a well-known theme from horror films. In The Shining is also a very scary identical twin. It's kind of in the culture. A lot of research has been done on identical twins. Especially in terms of nature and nurture. When they don't grow up together, they start to look even more alike than when they do grow up together. This is because, in the latter case, they still try to be unique and start to oppose each other.'

'These identical twins are similar but also very different from each other. They also have different memories of the same things. That's what the book is about. That creates friction.'

Their mother died at birth. The father prevented their murder by shielding them from the outside world.

Titus is angry with the father. The first-person narrator is not. The father, in all their poverty, is actually very kind to the boys.
'The first-person narrator does have warm feelings for his father but he also despises him because he is very religious. After all, these boys are not. They don't understand that because they didn't grow up within the context of a church community. They have almost no contact with other people. They learn about the world through books, which are banned. And through records, music.'

When the earth starts collapsing as a result of the pumping of 'earthblood', a type of petroleum, the boys have to flee from what they nevertheless consider their safe haven.
'I wanted the fight between these guys to be about their memories. That's what time does, time eats things up. With them it is literally like that, there is no more evidence. Everything behind them has been destroyed. All they have left is the world as it is in their heads. They can never go back home again. They considered their home in the forest a safe place when that situation was not safe at all.'

About this podcast

The podcast series The Story features writers talking about their books. The interviews are nice and long, about 45 minutes so there is plenty of time to go deeper into the content. Both fiction and non-fiction and more or less weekly. Also with famous and less famous Dutch and Flemish writers.

Click here for the podcast episode with Auke Hulst