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Review 41: The Less You Know The Sounder You Sleep by Juliet Butler

The Less You Know The Sounder You Sleep
Other people can make life hard. After all, we’re each given this pink-and-grey hunk of headmeat that sits quite apart from everyone else, merrily pumping out our own thoughts and dreams, actions and reactions. Other people help to define who we are, but can also encroach on our own individuality at times. So imagine how it must feel to be a conjoined twin, and never able to be alone.

This is the premise of The Less You Know, The Sounder You Sleep by Juliet Butler, a story about the true-life conjoined twins Masha and Dasha Krivoshlyapova. It spans the course of their full lives from 1950 to 2003, living in various institutions in Moscow.

The difficulty of constant contact between the two sisters is compounded by the deep differences in their personalities. It’s actually almost a textbook abusive relationship, with Masha showing genuine signs of psychopathy – volatility, violence, charm and lack of empathy – and Dasha bearing the deep sensitivity, sadness and passivity of the depressive. Their inability to separate emphasises their emotional polarities.

This book is also an excoriating damning of the Soviet-then-Russian intolerance to difference. It’s regularly emphasised that there “are no invalids in the Soviet Union”, and that successive Russian governments, from communist to capitalist, have been united in their refusal to accept that anything seen as a defect could represent their country. When the twins were born, they were seen as fit only for unaesthetised medical experimentation; as they grew older, as nothing more than a burden on a state that wouldn’t give them the opportunity to work and pay their way. The anger that Butler feels about this bubbles under the writing, and rightly so.

Butler knew the twins during the last 15 years of their lives, which lends this book a real sense of authenticity. In some ways paradoxically, it makes the extremity of their personality differences justified, in a way that might feel hammed-up in a straight fiction book. You know they were real, and that she knew them well, and so you accept that the way they behaved is accurate, rather than amplified.

The writing style is quite simple, and I think this is designed to reflect their actual voices. They suffered from a lack of education, and were kept hemmed away from human contact, so it actually becomes quite a powerful representation of their isolation.

As you can probably tell, this is a profoundly sad book, and one unlike others I’ve read before. The political landscape is infuriating, but the ruminations on loneliness are heartbreaking. I don’t know whether the style would be to everyone’s tastes, but this book certainly affected me.

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