…an earthy and irreverent new voice, thrillingly uninhibited in style and subject matter. The Discomfort of Evening …teems—I say this admiringly—with all the filth of life…The novel didn't give me nightmares only because sleep became a faint possibility. Rijneveld will play to all your phobias and nurture new ones…And yet, I went to it every day without dread, with, in fact, a gratitude that surprised me. It was the gratitude of not being condescended to. Novels disappoint not only by being clumsily written or conceived but by presenting a version of the world that is simpler and more sanitized than we know it to be. Fiction about childhood is especially prone, with a few notable exceptions…The spaciousness of Rijneveld's imagination comes as terror and solace. That lack of squeamishness, that frightening extremity, which, in Hutchison's clean, calm translation, never feels showy or manipulative, gives full voice to the enormity of the children's grief, their obscene deprivation.
The New York Times - Parul Sehgal
06/15/2020
Rijneveld’s head-turning debut, a bestseller in their native Netherlands and a Booker International Prize nominee, puts a contemporary spin on classic wrath-of-God literature. Narrated by Jas, the prepubescent farm daughter of Dutch Reformists (Calvinist cousins to American Evangelicalism), the novel opens with the death of Jas’s oldest brother, Matthies, who drowns in an ice-skating accident. His demise unspools an already dubious family harmony. The father grows distant; the mother, emaciated and portentous, claims Matthies’s death to be a sign of the 10th biblical plague. . Another plague is referenced with the spread of foot-and-mouth disease in the livestock, and Jas tortures toads into mating, convinced it will help her parents to do the same. Meanwhile, Jas and her younger sister, Hanna, make plans to run away, while their older brother, Odde, devolves into a sadistic teenager. Like a scene in a Bosch painting, the macabre material is loaded with sexual transgressions, pedophilia, animal torture, and abuse. The onslaught can be numbing, but the translation’s soaring lyricism offers mercy for the reader. In another biblical plague, absolute darkness descended upon the land for three days. Here it lasts for almost 300 pages, not lifting until the final line. (Aug.)
This is Rijneveld in short: an earthy and irreverent new voice, thrillingly uninhibited in style and subject matter. . . . The spaciousness of Rijneveld’s imagination comes as terror and solace. That lack of squeamishness, that frightening extremity, which, in Hutchison’s clean, calm translation, never feels showy or manipulative, gives full voice to the enormity of the children’s grief, their obscene deprivation.”—Parul Sehgal, The New York Times —The Wall Street Journal —The Economist —Kirkus Reviews , starred review —Booklist , starred review —Publishers Weekly — Financial Times (UK)— Dazed (UK)—The Guardian (UK)The Discomfort of Evening ] introduces readers to both a memorably off-key narrator and a notable new talent.”—The Observer (UK)— Monocle (UK)—The Times (UK)—International Booker Prize judges' citation “A moving yet unsentimental reflection on solitude in the face of loss, nature, authority—and oneself. Rijneveld’s gorgeous, almost tactile prose brings to life, with unforgiving precision, the fears and fantasies haunting a wrecked childhood. A relentless, delicately devastating novel.”—Hernan Diaz —Max Porter “Rijneveld takes us into the bleak Dutch countryside, into a family's grief, and inside the mind of a girl who is in hiding from her own life. This beautiful, strange novel is filled with sentences that stopped me dead.”—Chris Power
10/09/2020
Twelve-year-old Jas Mulder lives with her two brothers, a sister, and their parents on a farm in the Netherlands. They are devout members of the Reformed church, and religion governs their lives. When Jas's beloved brother, Matthies, dies in an accident, the family grapples with challenges to their faith and very existence. Each family member grieves in his or her own way. Jas deals with constipation and refuses to take off her coat (her name means "jacket" in Dutch), while surviving brother Obbe becomes increasingly disturbed and cruel, Mum stops eating, and Dad retreats into himself and his farming. Through all this turmoil, Jas, who is studying the Holocaust at school, convinces herself that her mother is hiding a Jewish family in their basement. VERDICT Told in Jas's voice, this novel, this International Booker Prize winner is poetic and layered, building tension as it moves toward its devastating and catastrophic conclusion. Dutch poet Rijneveld penetrates her characters with unflinching, razor-sharp intensity as they wrestle with issues of religion, sex, and death, making for a difficult if ultimately rewarding read.—Jacqueline Snider, Toronto
★ 2020-06-03
After Matthies Mulder’s ice-skating venture to “the other side” of the lake in a rural farming village ends with his being trapped under the ice, the entire Mulder family unravels in ways so unsettling that death (and the allure of “the other side”) beckons insidiously to those left behind. Members of a dogmatic Reformed church, the family stoically attempts to carry on life as before Matthies’ death (a life cheerlessly marked by repression, guilt, the visceral horrors of dairy farming, and domination by an omniscient God). As Jas’ parents slowly recede into states of icy indifference, the three surviving children create their own system of rules and survival, marked by tics, abuse, incestuous experimentation, and abject cruelty to animals (and other living creatures). Jas’ narration of her family’s journey into solitary madnesses alternates between poetic simplicity and childish fantasy about adult life and the world beyond farm and village. Connections between the causes and effects of life events waver between the grotesque and the mundane while Jas’ ability to comprehend the world around her wavers as well. Trigger warnings may not suffice to warn unwary readers of the scatology, violence, and misogyny Jas recounts, but the larger warning should attach to the world she describes, not to her story.
Rijneveld’s extraordinary narrator describes a small world of pain which is hard to look at and harder to ignore.
