Lucas Rijneveld

In case you felt that Rijneveld's first novel was a tough read, the second one ups the game considerably. We're four years on from The discomfort of evening, in a very similar disaster-struck farming family (but not exactly the same one). The young girl who corresponds to the narrator from last time is now 14, but the viewpoint has shifted to that of the slightly creepy vet who was her only real adult friend in the last book. Almost needless to say, he's now got a bad case of the Humbert show more Humberts.

So this is basically Lolita-in-the-cowshed. We are stuck in the vet's first-person view, we watch him sinking deeper and deeper into his obsession with the girl and — always against his better judgement — concocting pathetic stratagems to exploit her weakness and get closer to her. As in Lolita, we come to realise that he's telling us, or his investigators, the story after it has all gone horribly wrong. There are shifts back and forth between reality, dreams, and fantasy, and there is complicated play with words and images — but they are taken from the vet's James Herriott vocabulary, not Nabokov's academic and literary one.

But of course there's another level to it as well: implicitly, this is not Humbert Humbert as imagined by a middle-aged Russian intellectual making fun of the American dream, this is Humbert Humbert as imagined by Lolita. Which of course adds several levels of discomfort for the reader right away: we are shown very clearly how the girl is desperately lonely, desperately unsure of herself, made insecure by the loss of her brother and her mother, worried about adolescence and gender identity, and all she's got to cling onto apart from her dreams is the fraudulent and exploitative affection she gets from the vet.

Rich, powerful and very complicated writing. But also very disturbing. show less

In the Mind of a Child

It’s as if Rijneveld had to get it all out there before they forgot. The Discomfort of Evening draws upon many of Rijneveld‘s own experiences growing up on a bleak farm in the Netherlands around the turn of the century.

Jas is ten and her family is falling apart. The tight external structure of extreme religion is not enough to hold it together in the face of two tragic events in as many years. In fact regular visits of Church Elders and the extreme beliefs of the show more Dutch Reformed Church are stifling influences on the family. The parents distance themselves from each other and from the children. The.children are left in a vacuum. Schooling is intermittent. Jas is forced to fill in the gaps of the “why” of everything in order for her world to make sense.

From the accidental drowning of her older brother, the death of the farm cows who are euthanized due to an out break of foot and mouth disease, to witnessing the animal cruelty of her surviving brother, Jas has a mind full of explanations.

Told by her teacher to write a letter to Anne Frank, she’s confused. How can Anne read a letter? She finds out her birthday is the same date as Hitler’s (as is Rijneveld‘s) and fears she herself must be bad. She tells a Hitler joke at school, so off that it’s been excluded from the English translation.

At home at night she looks at the glow-in-the-light star stickers and peels one off and sticks it on her coat. She thinks there are Jews hiding in the basement and worries they aren’t getting enough food when her family falls on hard times after the cow disease.

She keeps toads under her desk hoping they will mate as this will mean her parents might and then her drowned brother will be replaced. She masturbates on her teddy bear and watches when her surviving brother does sexual acts with a coke can on her complicit younger sister. She tries to make sense of every little thing. She imagines teeth peeping up through the snow, teeth that have kept growing, the teeth of dead animals buried on the farm. Why would teeth not keep growing? she asks herself. When her drowned brother’s body is kept for days in a cooled coffin, she lifts the clear viewing lid to see if he’s warm. It’s Christmas time when he dies and the parents cancel Christmas. Her mother takes the Christmas decorations down and carries them to the basement where the Jews are living.

The paucity of Jax’s external life contrasts with her mind’s imaginative explanations. This juxtaposition of external and internal increases as the child Jas progresses though puberty where sexual ideation escalates.

The reader starts to enter Jan’s/ Rijneveld’s mind. If any thing even partly normal happens we are jolted out of it by something some horror. We enter a world we don’t want to be in.

Reading The Disturbance of Evening is an unnerving and enduring experience, but one I am honored that I was allowed into. show less

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 show more 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. show less

I started drafting this review after I had finished about one-third of the book; I wanted to be sure to get my thoughts written down before I forgot those aspects of the writing that impressed me, either positively or negatively. The more I read, however, the more my review changed. If you have read much about this novel, you know it is a controversial work: highly challenging and difficult with much that may be offensive and obnoxious. Having now finished, however, I can say that much as I show more found sections of it highly disturbing, I have come to have respect for what I think Rijneveld has accomplished. The fascination—or, perhaps, obsession would be a better word—with penises. The vivid depiction of animal torture (and murder—sorry, there is no other word for it in my lexicon). The numerous references to Adolf Hitler. While I do not object to these subjects as potentially valuable tools in literature, they are highly charged subjects for many and demand to be handled carefully. Even when handled well, as I think is the case here, each such topic is delicate; when taken cumulatively, they can be overwhelming.
What most impressed me (although I will confess that it took me a long time to appreciate it) is Rijneveld’s masterful handling of very difficult subjects. These frequently confront the reader and his* accomplishment is to keep these matters front and center without overdoing it, as I thought at first. The nature of the story is key to understanding the place of obsession and animal torture and other disturbing topics. Jas, a 10-year-old girl, is the novel’s protagonist. Her adored older brother dies very early in the book and the novel recounts how she and her family (an older brother, younger sister, and their parents—a devout Dutch Reformed couple who own a dairy farm) deal with this trauma and each other. No one—least of all the parents—is able to handle it, much less help any of the others. And so badly damaged people are constantly forced to see and deal with each other. The novel is the story of the disintegration of individuals and of a family. In the case of Jas in particular, the disintegration is paired with the urges and seemingly unanswerable questions of adolescence.
In the context of the story, Rijneveld’s choices are realistic and even powerful. Grief overwhelms the family and each person, in his or her own way, begins to fall apart, especially her remaining brother, Obbe. The children, often at Obbe’s urging, engage in more and more disturbing and utterly frightening behavior. I suspect that this is what caused many readers to abandon or even hate the book. It nearly lost me as well. Intense, unsettling images and behavior are a legitimate—if difficult for most readers—way to describe someone grappling with deep grief and the urges and awakenings of adolescence. That said, I have to admit that it took me a very long time to appreciate that Rijneveld’s reliance on such images were, in fact, a convincing engagement with emotional upheaval; reading the text was often exhausting. Repetition may accurately portray an obsession but the ability to portray repetition without simply repeating oneself or losing the reader is no small feat. Grief is an enormously powerful—and intensely personal—emotion. I think Rijneveld has undertaken a great project, a sort of literary high-wire act. And largely succeeded.
Rijneveld understands how a child seeks to make sense of her world and of the way in which children piece together their world from the parts they encounter: Bible quotations, the behavior of adults around them, tangible fragments of meaningful objects…how they understand them or how they misunderstand them and how they will put it all together, forcing even nonsensical misunderstandings into a comprehensible, to them, logic. He meaningfully weaves together all of these pieces and more. Most significantly in terms of the book’s themes, the sacrifices that the children convince themselves have to be made make sense, although I struggled with the multiple instances in which animals are killed. Death hovers over the book constantly. Finally, I am puzzled that so many reviews of the book consider the end to be a shock. Although the exact manner of the end is a surprise, the end itself is constantly foreshadowed.
I didn’t particularly like this book. But I respect it and I respect Rijneveld’s accomplishments. For a writer of any age, much less someone this young (29 when the book was published), it’s an enormous achievement. I haven’t said much about what I think are the book’s flaws and I did find things I objected to. Most notably, I think that Jas has thoughts and says things far too mature for a 10 or 12-year-old (the book covers about two years of time). Her sister’s behavior near the end of the book also strikes me as not believable for a 10-year-old. In addition, I am uncertain that it was necessary to “burden” Jas with adolescence at the same time she had to deal with her brother’s death. Two life-changing traumas simultaneously is a tall order. But I understand (I think) why Rijneveld did it. Despite these issues—and I do not think that they are minor matters—I have no hesitation in recommending the book for those prepared to deal with it on its own terms.

*Although Rijneveld previously used they/them pronouns, in January 2022, he announced that henceforth he would use he/him. This is reflected in the book's biography on the back cover. show less