The Discomfort of Evening: A Novel

Written by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

Narrated by Genevieve Gaunt

WINNER OF THE 2020 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE

A stark and gripping tale of childhood grief from one of the most exciting new voices in Dutch literature

Ten-year-old Jas lives with her strictly religious parents and her siblings on a dairy farm where waste and frivolity are akin to sin. Despite the dreary routine of their days, Jas has a unique way of experiencing her world: her face soft like cheese under her mother’s hands; the texture of green warts, like capers, on migrating toads in the village; the sound of “blush words” that aren’t in the Bible.

One icy morning, the disciplined rhythm of her family’s life is ruptured by a tragic accident, and Jas is convinced she is to blame. As her parents’ suffering makes them increasingly distant, Jas and her siblings develop a curiosity about death that leads them into disturbing rituals and fantasies. Cocooned in her red winter coat, Jas dreams of “the other side” and of salvation, not knowing where this dreaming will finally lead her.

A bestseller in the Netherlands, Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s radical debut novel The Discomfort of Evening offers readers a rare vision of rural and religious life in the Netherlands. In it, they ask: In the absence of comfort and care, what can the mind of a child invent to protect itself? And what happens when that is not enough? With stunning psychological acuity and images of haunting, violent beauty, Rijneveld has created a captivating world of language unlike any other.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brilliance Audio
• Translator: Michele Hutchison
• Release date: Aug 18, 2020
• ISBN: 9781713542926

Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

Marieke Lucas Rijneveld grew up in a Reformed farming family in North Brabant before moving to Utrecht. She is also the author of two poetry collections. In addition to writing, Rijneveld works on a dairy farm.

Reviews for The Discomfort of Evening

[sriddell_8 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This was a very difficult and demanding book to read. So well written (which is why I gave it 3 stars) but the subject matter is raw and grim and gritty - reflecting the raw and grim and gritty circumstances of the inhabitants of this novel.

The book opens with a young girl, Jas, suspecting that her rabbit is about to become Christmas dinner. She prays that God take her brother and spare the rabbit. And in short order, her brother drowns when he breaks through thin ice. Fair warning - this opening is the most cheerful part of the book.

The family descends into depression and repression. The parents try unsuccessfully to explain everything in terms of religion, while openly arguing about which of them should be allowed to join their dead son. The three remaining siblings are left to flounder in grief and an exploration of suicidal ideations. The ending is very abrupt. I was wondering where this story would end and was at first surprised...but then of course how else could it end?

I feel like a trigger warning should be added to this book - serious mental/physical/sexual child abuse, and overt, ugly, pointless animal abuse. I listened to this on audio and found myself just cringing at some of the scenes in this book.

[icolford · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The Discomfort of Evening is narrated by 10-year-old Jas Mulder and describes in graphic, sometimes distressing detail the mental, spiritual and moral breakdown of the Mulder family following the death of Jas’s older brother Matthies, who drowns after falling through the ice while skating on a lake near their home. The story takes place in rural Holland, where Jas’s father runs the family’s dairy farm. The Mulders are members of the Dutch Reformed Church, an ultra-strict Christian sect that lives by scripture and in constant fear of a vengeful God. In the aftermath of the eldest brother’s death, the remaining children—Jas, teenage brother Obbe and younger sister Hanna—are more or less cut adrift as their parents retreat into all-consuming guilt and grief. Convinced their misfortune is God’s punishment for some infraction, their dogmatic father immerses himself in the rituals of farming, and their mother develops an aversion to certain foods, beginning a slow and agonizing process of wasting away. In the absence of the grounding influence of adult oversight, the children indulge a variety of fantasies and fetishes. Jas’s unhealthy obsessions begin with her winter coat, which she wears at all times, indoors and outdoors. She develops a fixation on bodily orifices and sexual functions (boys’ “willies” in particular), which leads to some disturbing behaviours that Rijneveld describes in detail. As recounted by Jas, Obbe’s behaviour tends toward the psychopathic and includes cruelty toward small animals and some violent sexual experimentation. Later in the book, the family is again visited by misfortune when their herd is infected with foot-and-mouth disease and must be destroyed. In response to these calamities and their parents’ neglect, Jas and Hanna hatch “The Plan,” which is to escape to “the other side” of the lake that claimed the life of their brother. The loose structure of Rijneveld’s prize-winning novel is disorienting and deliberate. Incidents do not lead logically or inevitably from one to the next, but instead seem to accumulate until the gathering pressures force the characters to act. The Discomfort of Evening represents a fierce triumph of the imagination and describes a reality that is twisted and terrifying. It is undeniably engrossing, in the manner of a train wreck. But it also poses a great challenge to the reader by telling a story that not everyone will be comfortable hearing.

[richardderus · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Rating: 3* of five (I guess...)A LITTLE FREE LIBRARY FIND. IT'S GOING BACK RIGHT NOW.My Review: Excrement, depression, religious nuttery, what I strongly suspect is a suicide...all still within my tolerance. Then Obbe is disgustingly cruel to his hamster in front of his very young sisters and Jas says:'Right,' Dad says, 'off to your bedroom, you, and pray.'His shoe hits my bum; the poo stuck up it might have shot back up in my intestines now. When Mum learns the truth about {the hamster} she'll get depressed again and won't speak for days. I glance at {her brother and sister} one last time, then the Lego castle {where the dying hamster is hidden from their father). My brother is suddenly busy with his butterfly collection. He probably just beat them out of the air with his bare hands.That's page 79. Add in a parent hitting a child with a shoe and I am just not here for it. I don't think others will have my sensitivity to animal cruelty or using an object to strike a child, and the imagery is so well-rendered into English I forgot it was a translation; whatever there is to recommend it, I can not, and do not wish to, go there.

[thorold_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A detailed and very painful description of a family falling apart in the process of grieving for a child killed in a skating accident. Narrator Jas and her surviving siblings are essentially left to fend for themselves, with their parents so overcome by their reaction to the tragedy that they aren't really able to spare any emotional energy for being parents any more. But the process of growing up doesn't have a Pause button, and the kids, whilst sharing their parents' grief for their lost brother, still have all the puzzling, exciting, frightening and unstoppable experience of puberty to deal with. The result is a sort of cross between the book of Job and Lord of the flies, with Rijneveld piling on the disasters whilst expertly manipulating both the comically naive and the devastatingly clear-sighted parts of a child's view of the world to leave us with maximum discomfort. Not an enjoyable read, but a clever and powerful piece of writing.

[kakadoo202 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Dark. Haunting. Sad. Sudden ending that shocked me.

[oldblack-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Sad. Horrifying.

[wellreadcatlady · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

As the title says, this book causes discomfort at times as a reformed Dutch family deals with trauma. It’s weird and disjointed, but well written and unique. 4/5!

[arosoff-513117 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I'm still not sure if I liked this. it's written with a kind of aggressive unpleasantness that left me uncomfortable. But I think it was effective.

[maryreinert · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

There's not too many books that I don't finish but this is one. Although I liked the premise and the setting -- the Netherlands on a dairy farm, I just couldn't get into the story told by a young girl whose brother died in a drowning. Tried it based on a review and that it was a finalist for the Booker award.