Descent into darkness … Lollum, The Netherlands. Photograph: Frans Lemmens
BOOK OF THE DAY
2020 / Books of the year
The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld review – a family’s grief
Tragedy shapes the darkly ritualistic world of three children in a Reformed farming family, in this bestseller from the Netherlands
Theodora Danek
Fri 20 Mar 2020 07.30 GMT
Last modified on Thu 2 Apr 2020 14.49 BST
O
n a cold winter day in the rural Netherlands, a boy goes ice skating on the local pond. His sister Jas, who had asked to come along, is resentful at being excluded. Fearing that her father might serve up her pet rabbit as a Christmas meal, she prays that God might take Matthies instead. When her brother falls through the ice, her impulsive wish comes true. Grief and trauma begin to tear the fabric of Jas’s deeply religious farming family apart.
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Marieke Lucas Rijneveld
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From that day on, three forces shape Jas’s world: death, sex and religion. Grief rules the house where Matthies’s name must no longer even be mentioned. As the parents prove incapable of taking care of their remaining three children, the siblings’ fear of and curiosity about death leads them into spirals of magical thinking that involve rituals and sacrifices of increasing violence. Raised in a strict Reformed household, Jas perceives the world through scripture, which she quotes frequently. Her father quizzes his children about the Bible and beats Jas’s brother for taking the Lord’s name in vain. Her mother’s favourite day is Sunday, a day ruled by the “bare essentials” – “the love of God’s word and Mom’s vegetable soup”. The rules Jas and her siblings invent for themselves join the many rules their parents and church already impose on them.This is the era of playing Snake on Nokia phones and The Sims on the family computer, a last generation of teenagers without frequent access to the internet. Caught in the no-man’s-land between childhood and adulthood, Jas and her younger sister Hanna experiment with masturbation without recognising what it is, while the sexual games they play with their older brother Obbe become increasingly disturbing, as cruel as the animal sacrifices he asks Jas to make. The children’s ignorance of their own changing desires is unsurprising in a family environment shaped by the twin forces of belonging to an orthodox church and keeping livestock: bodies are there to be useful, to mate and (re)produce. Jas’s ongoing constipation is addressed by sticking soap up her bum – the same treatment that is handed out to calves. The vet, a frequent visitor, tells Jas she is almost “complete”; her father asks her how her breasts are developing, hidden under the red jacket she hasn’t taken off since her brother’s death. This protective layer has now become a part of her identity – “jas” means “jacket” in Dutch.
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Marieke Lucas Rijneveld
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Marieke Lucas Rijneveld tells the story from Jas’s perspective, in the first person and the present tense. This presents a riddle to the reader: the knowingness of the author sits in contrast to the narrator, who is 12 years old by the end of the book. The text is peppered with rhetorical questions (“Are Mum and Dad the pests that keep eating away at us?”) and similes. “We’re as empty as the Queen Beatrix biscuit tin on the breakfast table we once won on the Postcode Lottery: no one can fill us up,” Jas points out in a moment of characteristic self-contemplation. Everything is filtered through her eyes, a child who believes that her mother is hiding Jewish people in the basement and that killing an animal will save her family. Yet this is also a narrator who is curiously observant of other people. About her father, she remarks that he “stacks his worries like the sticks of kindling: they blaze up in our feverish minds”. Much here is told, not shown, the conclusions spelt out for the reader in metaphors and similes.
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Marieke Lucas Rijneveld
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Rijneveld, whose pronouns are they/them, is also a lauded poet whose debut collection Kalfsvlies (Calf’s Caul) covers similar themes. Rijneveld shares some biographical reference points with their characters, having also grown up in a Reformed farming family and lost an older brother as a child. Now longlisted for the Booker International prize, The Discomfort of Evening was a bestseller and prizewinner in the Netherlands, hailed as a brilliant achievement by a major new talent. In the English translation, the choice to break up longer Dutch sentences into shorter fragments, often by inserting semicolons and colons, subtly changes the tone of the novel, tempering the urgency of Jas’s breathless, slightly dreamy monologue. Translator Michele Hutchison deftly switches between registers and gives Jas a strong, unique voice.
Ultimately, the novel will find both admirers and detractors for its poetic, mannered language, realistic bleakness and descent into surreal darkness. The book doesn’t quite keep the promise of its compelling first part, where Rijneveld and Hutchison immerse us in Jas’s world with detailed observations: a dried-up raisin found under a cabinet, skin formed on warm milk. As the tragedies pile up and the narration intensifies, the fascinating characters and themes sometimes lose their immediacy amid dense prose.
• The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, translated by Michele Hutchison, is published by Faber (RRP £12.99)
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