The Discomfort Of Evening
by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld
Award: Booker International Winner 2020
Date Read: November 2, 2023
Four siblings are growing up in a rural village in the Netherlands by fundamentalist parents who push the word of God above affection. As each of them come of age in their own way, the eldest, Matthies, drowns when he falls through the ice while skating with friends. The aftermath of this devastating loss is devastating on its own.
Told through the perspective of Jas, the eldest girl, she is trying her best to make sense of this tragedy and the best she can come up with are the plagues in the Bible. The family loses all of their cows, their main cash crop, to hoof and mouth disease. They have an invasion of frogs. They have lost their eldest son. How could this not be a punishment for sin?
Jas has enshrouded herself in her red jacket and is slowly collecting things in its pockets – wrappers, whiskers, a cheese scoop. She wears her coat 24/7 as a way to avoid all the germs in the world and to keep herself pure.
Full of sexual exploration that has me scratching my head, the incessant torturing of animals (a hamster, frogs, cows, a rooster), Jas and Hanna and Obbe are all just trying to cope while their parents are consumed by their own grief. When they do turn an eye to their children, they offer scripture instead of affection. I wanted to throttle them both.
Meanwhile, Jas is slowly coming unglued – wetting the bed, becoming terrifyingly constipated, fearful of germs, tied to her red coat like a shroud – that she and Hanna just want to be rescued from it all. In the end, Jas finds a way to escape forever.
This was one of the saddest novels I have read in quite some time. Rijneveld has painted so bleakly a family in crisis. I will not forget this one ever.
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