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| Marieke Lucas Rijneveld |
Marieke Lucas Rijneveld,Netherlands: ‘It’s difficult for my parents to understand that I’m not the girl that they raised’
When Marieke Lucas Rijneveld was three years old, their 12-year-old brother was knocked over and killed by a bus as he walked to school from the family farm. Rijneveld’s response to this early confrontation with the unthinkable was not to draw a veil over it, but to build two books around it. “I think it’s unfortunate for a family to have a writer born into it,” says the 28-year-old author, serenely.
In the devoutly religious rural community among which the Rijneveld family still live, the exposure was sudden and extreme. When Calf’s Caul, a poetry collection, was published in 2015, its young author was heralded in the national media as a new star of Dutch literature. More challenging still for the family was the novel that arrived three years later, De avond is ongemak, which appears in English this week as The Discomfort of Evening(Faber, translated by Michelle Hutchison), and has just been longlisted for the International Booker prize. “All the shopkeepers and the hairdresser were talking about it, but my family are too frightened to read it,” says Rijneveld, who uses the pronouns they/them.
In The Discomfort of Evening, Matthies dies in a skating accident, leaving his 10-year-old sister Jas fantasising about how to prevent the family from being destroyed in the aftermath. She keeps two toads in a box under her bed, thinking that if they can be persuaded to mate, her parents might too, and everything will be all right again. Meanwhile, left to cope with the emotional turbulence of adolescence without adult support, she plays games with her surviving brother and sister that become increasingly wild and dangerous.
The novel is set over the two years in Jas’s life when hormones corral children into adult sexual identities. Rijneveld resists such categorisation, self‑describing not as trans but as “in between”. “As a small child I felt I was a boy, I dressed like a boy and behaved like a boy, but children at that age are still neutral in their gender. In adolescence, when the separation became clear, I dressed like a girl and became a girl, then at 20 I went back to the boy I was at primary school.” Their middle name, Lucas, comes from an imaginary boyfriend they had as a young child. Elegantly dressed in trademark suit and braces, Rijneveld’s composure only breaks when they struggle to remember the name of the film star they aspire to be. It finally emerges in a burst of giggles: “Timothée Chalamet, star of Call Me by Your Name – I want to be a beautiful boy.”
They have not yet decided whether to take hormone treatment, so when they read their work publicly it is in an unbroken voice, radiating an androgynous charm that has made them one of the poetry circuit’s rare breakout stars. “What a sweetheart,” wrote a commenter in response to a Dutch TV chatshow on the environment, in which Rijneveld signed up to the David Attenborough fan club, urged listeners to heed his warnings about the climate emergency and reported that they had never flown in a plane.
Only their hands betray their other life as a one-day-a-week dairy farmer, with scrubbed nails that are bitten to the quick. “Farming keeps me grounded. The cows are my best friends; I like cleaning out the stables and shovelling the shit.”
This unglamorous side of farming slops through both the novel and the poems. Jas’s mother doses her children with worm medicine and slathers them with udder ointment to protect against the cold. One of the poems in Calf’s Caul is titled “Lice Mothers”. “People from the city get scared of these things that villagers think of as normal.” For example? “For example, torturing frogs – it’s not very nice but it happens and children will experiment with it.”
Despite being published three years apart, the novel and poetry collection began in tandem, even sharing some lines. “The challenge was how to write them when I didn’t have many memories of my brother’s death. So I started with Matthies, and only during the writing arrived at the shape the novel has now. I saw Calf’s Caul as preparation for writing The Discomfort of Evening.”
The collection, which has yet to be published in English, is full of the anxieties that Rijneveld’s chosen identity has created in a family who are god-fearing members of the Reformed church. “Papa has been searching for a daughter for years,” reads one poem. “It’s difficult for my parents to understand that I’m not the girl that they raised,” Rijneveld says. “It’s not in the Bible.”
Whether the papa of the poems is any more Rijneveld’s own father than Jas’s papa in the novel is left open by a writer who admits that they regard their public identity as a performance, to be donned along with the braces. “Writing is playing with who you are. Being an author makes me feel more confident.”
Rijneveld was born on 20 April 1991 on a farm in the north Brabant, a province in the south of the Netherlands. The date is significant, they disarmingly disclose, because it means they share a birthday with Adolf Hitler. “As a child I thought it was a funny idea to be born on the same day as such a monstrous man, but it made me wonder if I was a good or a bad person.” In the novel, Jas builds a fantasy about a Jewish family her mother has hidden away in the basement. She acts out her social alienation by making a Nazi salute at school and cracking a joke which was judged too offensive for the English edition of the novel.
It’s part of a strand of black humour that is as dangerous in its way as the children’s games (one gruesome scene involves a dummy cow and an insemination gun). Asked why the novel pushes so hard at boundaries of what is acceptable, the author shrugs: “It is related by a child and children are naive. They say these things. They don’t know any better, so they can get away with an innocent joke.”
At nine years old, Rijneveld says, “I had a very strong belief in God and was convinced he was living in the attic.” The novel is full of glimpses into what it was like growing up in a strict religious household. Jas’s father restricts their TV channels for fear of nudity, which he pronounces “as if a fruit fly had just flown into his mouth – he spat as he said it”; her mother daringly watches a quiz show involving words that are not in the Bible. “She called them ‘blush words’ because some of them made your cheeks turn red.” When her children try out these words, she attempts “to wash them out of our mouths with a bar of green soap, like the grease stains from our good school clothes”.
Of their own experience Rijneveld simply says: “Behind the book is such a strong force. After leaving school I didn’t know what to do. I started living in a room in a new city and I just knew I had to write it. In daily life it’s hard to be as strong as I am behind my laptop.” They now live in Utrecht, and work on a farm that is not their parents’.
There are only two responses to the death of a child, Rijneveld says: either it draws a family closer or rips them apart. So what happened in their own family? “I have to think about the answer to that … ” Rijneveld says solemnly. “No, it hasn’t torn us apart, but all the relationships changed.” One brother and sister are now teachers, and a second brother is in the police. None of them has read the novel. “I hope that my parents will read it one day and be proud; that they will understand it’s a novel, it’s not all about them. But it is probably too soon.”
Meanwhile Rijneveld’s writing has gained them a new cultural family, which stretches beyond the Netherlands to Italy and Germany. Calf’s Caul has gone through 11 editions to date in Dutch while The Discomfort of Evening has sold 55,000 copies in the Netherlands; it will be published in French in April and is currently being translated into Spanish, Korean, Chinese and Arabic. A second poetry collection is already out, and Rijneveld is working on a second novel. All of which bears out their fervent belief that “there’s always light in darkness, just as there’s always humour in gruesomeness. It’s just the way things work. There must always be something to laugh about.” Claire Armitstead
Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s The Discomfort of Evening, translated by Michelle Hutchison, is published by Faber in the UK and out now.
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