The Discomfort of Evening by Lucas Rijneveld

The coat is an important
plot element

And so we continue our journey along the North Sea coast, from Belgium to the Netherlands. And just like the icy, grey sea, our books are getting ever more bleak and austere.

Lucas Rijneveld grew up as part of a devout Reformed protestant family in rural southern Netherlands. He is the first non-binary writer to win The International Booker Prize (which was for this novel), and has stated he prefers he/him in English and she/her (or rather zij/haar) in Dutch.

Full disclosure: It's been a fair while since I read The Discomfort of Evening. I am very behind on my posts, as such the details are not as fresh in my mind as I would like, and the review will be considerably shorter.

Rijnelveld has stated that the book was inspired by the death of his brother, which occured when Lucas was 3. And it looks likely that this is another largely autobiographical novel, though I have not seen anywhere where this is explicitly stated. But the protagonist, Jas, also grows up on a remote dairy farm, with a very religious family. The story begins with Jas's brother dying after he goes through the ice whilst skating on a canal. The event essentially breaks the family, and begins a downward spiral, both for Jas and everyone else, particularly her mother. To make matters even worse Foot & Mouth disease hits the area shortly afterwards, and the family's cattle have to be put down.

Lucas looks jollier here than one would
 suspect having read the book

The writing is sparse and almost clinical, while maintaining the authentic voice of a young girl. Jas sees things in the disjointed way of a clever child, analysing everything, but lacking the life experience to link things together in the way an adult would. Sometimes this leads her to see things with more accuracy, as they are not coloured by what she expects.

The Discomfort of Evening is a superbly crafted book (and hats must be taken off to the translator here as well) and I think we will be hearing more from Rijnveld (I sincerely hope so anyway). Personally, though, I found the book too unremittingly bleak. It verges on trauma-porn, where each chapter seems to attempt to outdo the last, piling awful thing after awful thing upon poor Jas. Depending on how autobiographical the novel is, this aspect may have been somewhat out of Rijnveld's hands, of course. But without the contrast of anything good, or happy, or wholesome in the book, the nastiness ceased to shock, and started to seem contrived. I get that it was meant to be claustrophobic (and it certainly was, with little sense of anything outside of the district existing) but without the light, our eyes adjusted to the unending dark.

And so, for the second book in a row, the fifth star is narrowly missed, but The Discomfort of Evening gets a worthy ★★★★☆.