Marieke Lucas Rijneveld; trans. Michele Hutchison
Set on a dairy farm in the Netherlands, The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, translated from the Dutch by Michele Hutchison, is a dark and disturbing novel about a family unraveling after the accidental death of Matthies, the eldest son.
The novel unfolds in the first-person voice of ten-year-old Jas. Angry that her brother won’t take her when he goes ice-skating, Jas wishes he would die instead of her rabbit. When Matthies dies by falling through the ice, Jas’ unraveling begins—an unraveling compounded by watching her family fall apart.
The family’s repression, guilt, and grief manifest themselves in different ways. The parents offer no comfort to their children and basically abandon them to fend for themselves. The father buries his grief by citing words from the Bible. The mother stops eating, becoming little more than a skeletal frame. She openly expresses her wish to die even in front of her children. Jas’ other brother, Obbe, resorts to performing acts of barbaric cruelty on animals and then on his sisters and their friends. He bashes his head obsessively on the bedframe each night. And Jas’ little sister shares her fantasy of going to “the other side.” At one point, she bizarrely inserts her tongue into her sister’s mouth. In a desperate attempt to comfort herself, Jas wraps her body in a tatty red coat, refusing to remove it. She sticks a drawing pin in her belly button and watches with indifference as it begins to scab. Additionally, she suffers from chronic constipation.
The novel is replete with unfettered cruelty to humans and animals. Scenes of violence in which every orifice in the human body is penetrated by a foreign object are described in graphic detail. To remedy Jas’ constipation, her father stuffs soap in her anus to make her go to the bathroom. Obbe routinely kills animals in front of his sisters. And in one very disturbing scene, a metal artificial insemination gun is forced into the body of one of Jas’ friends. Scatological descriptions abound as does a morbid exploration of the human body and human sexuality. The children’s dirty fingers poke around in nasty places. Descriptions are visceral and border on being gross.
The novel’s strength lies in its use of painstaking detail to describe a family spiraling toward disaster because of an inability to cope with the loss of the eldest son. Grief is repressed, which only compounds their problems. The parents’ indifference and/or obliviousness concerning their children’s welfare as they descend into increasingly barbaric and violent behavior is horrifying. Jas’ observations and painful interiority while her family falls apart are tragic and heartbreaking.
Although the novel is well-written and was awarded the 2020 Booker International Prize, its subject and manner of execution is not for the faint-hearted or for those who cannot read graphic details of bodily functions or of cruelty to humans and animals.