Marieke Lucas Rijneveld's The Discomfort of Evening: A Review

Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, The Discomfort of Evening (London: Faber & Faber, 2020 [2018]). 282 pages. Translated into English by Michele Hutchison.

Fundamentalism is but another deadly disease, and despite science and what appears to be human progress over the centuries, it is quite clear that the virus of zealotry and fanaticism continues to spread everywhere. Even in a village of the Netherlands, where ten-year-old Jas Mulder lives with her parents and three siblings, two males (Matthies, the eldest, and Obbe) and one sister, Hanna. The Mulders own a dairy farm, they’re actually poor and struggle to make a profit.

Two days before Christmas, Matthies puts in his skates and goes to the other side of the frozen lake that separates their farm from the village. He has an accident, falling through the ice and drowning. What until then had been a less than pleasant existence becomes quite a hell for Jas and Hanna. Life quickly degrades as the parents lose themselves in their grief and neglect the children, who are basically left to fend for themselves in their daily struggle. Hanna dreams of leaving the place for good. Jas thinks her mum is hiding a group of Jews in the basement. Obbe is a sadistic torturer of animals and at night compulsively strikes his forehead against the bedframe. What hope can there be for them?

Ice Skater by Axel Ender

The story is told by Jas, who is extremely observant and descriptive where smells, textures and shapes are concerned. Filth is omnipresent: the manure from the cows, the cheese they make, the dirty undies and pyjamas as Jas continually pees in her sleep. To make matters worse, she starts suffering from constipation, an issue her father attempts to sort out by inserting a piece of soap up her anus. In the meantime, her mother decides it is best not to eat anything at all.

Jas begins her story by telling the reader that she has stopped taking her coat off. After Matthies’ death, her sorrow is immense, for he treated her with a kindness and affection no other male in the family seems capable of. However, she is shocked into fear when told by her parents not to say his name.

But of course, there is the Church on Sundays. In her narrative, Jas repeatedly quotes passages from the Bible. Her parents are insanely devout, to the extent that their religion has somehow been transformed into a punitive code. Everything is seen as sinful, and the children’s numerous sins must be punished with brutality, of course. They probably wonder, in the wake of the loss of their eldest son, how come there is no sign of grace from the Saviour?

Gloomy, grim and dark. Not a happy place. A church in the Netherlands.

But then comes the plague, too, in the form of foot-and-mouth disease. Every single cow and calf will be put down; the Mulders have now lost what little they had. Both parents have seriously lost their marbles, and threats to leave the farm and abandon the family are voiced but never carried out.

This is more than a novel on people’s inability to express their grief. Rijneveld constructs a plausible narrator who is innocent in her brutality yet enchantingly ironic in her explorations of adolescent sexuality and the imaginative load she bears in her desperate attempts to escape sadness, neglect and self-blame. You may read the views of other reviewers who appear to recoil at the scatological episodes involving excrements, sperm, blood or even tools being stuck in inappropriate bodily orifices. Some readers, I daresay, need to grow up a bit and test the world out there. Imagination never bites.

A good book, a great story and a new author from whom we should expect more in the near future. Michele Hutchison’s English translation, The Discomfort of Evening, received the Booker International Prize in 2020.