The Discomfort of Evening is a paralyzingly excellent debut novel by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, translated from Dutch by Michele Hutchison. The novel follows the events of a family following a tragic death, while ten year old Jas helplessly watches her family disintegrate into grief from within the protection of her increasingly dirtied red coat. The novel doesn’t shy away from the uncomfortable underside of childhood, so often glorified in rosy tints. Instead, Rijneveld deals with topics such as sexual exploration, mental health and neglect surrounded by the ever-present characters of death and loss.
‘I wanted the vet to get up, and say it was all a mistake, that cows are not much different from sons: even if they go into the big wide world they always return to their stalls before sunset to be fed.’
The main thing that struck me about this novel is the way in which Rijneveld achieves an authentic child’s perspective. The novel doesn’t patronise, but achieves a character-driven plot that follows a child’s flawed logic as they attempt to make sense of the world around them. Jas’ childish reasoning is illogical and confused with melodic, unusual descriptions, leaving me to figure out through her limited understanding what is happening around her. There is a particular honesty surrounded their situation, as the children become an afterthought at best, neglected and ignored at worst, and I found myself almost brought to tears at the family’s inability to escape their situation.
Death brings a hole into the family, and we watch as each member is affected in their individual way. Jas seeks to ‘escape into [herself]’ and retreats into her coat, a defensive shell between her and the harsh realities of a world she has not been prepared to deal with. The siblings each try to come to terms with the unknown character of death with blame, experiments, and long nights detailing methods of death and suicide. There is a sense of endless futility to these exercises, and I began to wonder whether there was any hope for Jas and her siblings to move forward as her family fell into an oubliette of pain and sorrow.
Puberty and sex are explored in uncomfortable honesty, with the conflicts of a hyper-religious attitude hovering over the siblings. Without any support or education from their parents, sexuality is explored by Jas and her siblings in various graphic scenes they don’t fully understand. Rijneveld’s prose is uncomfortably honest despite its poetic style, a shock for a reader used to rose-tinted portrayals of childhood. As she grows older, Jas begins to notice the emotional gap between her parents but, like many people, she doesn’t understand there is no simple fix, and that hard as you may try, there is no simple cure for loss and love.
This novel is an incredibly well-written debut, managing to navigate mature themes through an authentic child’s perspective, no small feat. Although beautiful in its poetic rhythm, the prose can become disorientating; while this may be to reflect the mystifying nature of death and learning to navigate the world, it left me lost at times as extreme events were completely dropped until a few chapters later. However, the novel is one of the most necessarily uncomfortable depictions of a child’s navigation through grief and puberty that I have come across, and it is no wonder that it has been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize.
The Discomfort of Evening was the winner of the International Booker Prize 2020
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