Bleak, poignant exploration of grief and sexual awakening.

When her brother dies in a skating accident, ten-year-old Jas’s devout family splinters in grief. Roaming wild, the remaining children engage in increasingly brutal games.

The protagonist’s grief takes on a preoccupation with bodily orifices and excretions as she experiences puberty. Crammed with such raw intensity, this is not an easy read.

Set in the rural Netherlands during the foot and mouth disease epidemic the novel punches with natural, stark beauty and stunning imagery.

Discomforting.

My thanks to NetGalley and Faber and Faber Ltd for the ARC.

An unusual, unique book. Such a beautifully crafted story, of what it feels to be a 10 year old girl living in an isolated rural community in the Netherlands, in a family that is not mainstream even for that community. Layer over this with the sudden death of their eldest son just before Xmas and you have a unique set of very upsetting circumstances.. As days move on we see how this family copes or doesnt with this devastating death. It is dark,it is disturbing but it is ultimately engaging. It is a book that will stay in your heart and mind forever.

A beautiful and sensitively composed evocation of grief, family, identity and childhood. I was so drawn to these luminous, wonderful characters. A subtle and heartbreaking read. Perfect for fans of Max Porter, and a fantastic example of powerful fiction told from the perspective of a child learning gradually more and more of the darkness of the world.

The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Runeveld

I can't really see the point of this book unless it is to allow the author to expiate some of the horrors of her own childhood, since it is set on a dairy farm in North Holland with nasty overtones of religious fundamentalism and that is where she grew up.

The book starts with a poor farming family and the teenage son drowning while skating on a local lake. The rest of the book catalogues the horrific repercussions on the family. The father wrestles with his religion, the mother goes slowly mad and neither of them show any concern for their remaining children, Jas, the daughter narrator, Obbe her older brother, and Hanna, her younger sister.

Jas wrestles with things she simply cannot understand and is not supported by anyone. Blindly, she tries to make her own way through her grief with the damaged siblings and it all turns out catastrophically. It is simply a catalogue of ill health, pubescent confusion, cruelty and worse. And, don't forget the foot-and-mouth disease which destroys their living.

There is no intervention from the community in the story although it exists in the background and no external support for the children which I found hard to believe. There is no redemption, no lessons for the future, no happy endings for anyone and only a profound pessimism about the human condition.

No doubt some reviewers will say how this book is a frank and fearless portrayal of grief, of poor people trying to survive, how it is an indictment of religion and how, yes, everything really was that bad in the past. They will also point out how it is well observed from the daughters point of view, which it is, or, at least, unremittingly delivered and readers will have to make up their own mind about whether it is worth either starting or finishing such catalogue of despair.

It certainly wasn't for me and I'm not squeamish about what I read and it was, apparently, a bestseller in Holland. Maybe the funny bits were lost in translation!

The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld
Translated by Michele Hutchison
Harsh, bitter, cruel, brutal. These are the words that could describe this novel the best. But, unfortunately for the world we live in, this novel feels true and genuine. How is this much hardship,  so many problems and difficulties even possible in a life of a child. In a life of a family.
“Even though I sometimes try to look at myself from a distance, it doesn’t work, I’m stuck inside.”
We are following the story of our narrator Jas, a ten-year-old girl, brought up in a farming god fearing family of five in the 90s.
The whole novel is a whirlwind of many misconceptions of a child brought together by the tragedy of her brother’s death, influenced by religious indoctrination, strictness of her parents, grief, secrets kept from the child, insufficient knowledge and understanding of the world. I suppose all of it is the trigger or the cause of the child’s mental problems, depression, acting out and severe difficulties with herself as an individual, her self-image and her place in the world.
The very small world she lives in is her village, she knows and is not allowed to know anything beyond it. The city, television, bad words are forbidden. It seems like a place and a state of mind from a far away point in history. This could easily be in the middle ages, the baroque or the 19th century. The untruthfulness, the lies, the insincerity, the unfamiliarity, the harshness might be a part of a completely different era than our contemporary one. 
“Dad says children can’t have worries because they only come when you have to plough and grub your own fields, even though I keep discovering more and more worries of my own and they keep me awake at night. They seem to be growing.”
The combination of the seriousness, severity, solemnity and the way of thinking of a child is stunning. Leaves you speechless. The innocence of a child’s way of thinking, connections between things that have no similarity or consequence, the search of magic and the uncanny everywhere and the harsh reality. What a child has to conclude on its own when it doesn’t get any help from the outside. No explanations, nothing comforting to hold on. Just crude facts and silence. The only thing audible is God’s word – cruel, unrelenting and strict. No help, no complaisance, no clemency. Just harshness, hardness, hardship.
“The teacher told us during the history lesson that Hitler had fallen through ice when he was four and had been saved by a priest, that some people can fall through ice and it’s better if they’re not rescued. I wondered then why a bad person like Hitler could be saved and not my brother. Why the cows had to die while they hadn’t done anything wrong.”
A terrible failure in parenting, but a terrible failure in their own lives as well. Inability to help each other, others or themselves. Just terrible lives in unbelievably harsh circumstances. Everything is unbelievable, hard, sick.
There are so many problems here: grief, sadness, guilt, child sexuality, violence, closeness to death, expectance of death, not fitting in, peer abuse, sexual abuse, problems with digestion as a result of it all.
Difficult, troublesome, haunting, extremely well written, unlike anything else I have ever read. So powerful, characters are lifelike and unlike any others, the narrator with the most original point of view. Not an easy read, but a meaningful, serious and important one. Highly recommended!
I received a free review copy from the publisher in exchange for honest review. Thank you Faber and Faber and Netgalley.

It is unusual to read a novel which so firmly grasps my attention and demands that it be read in great chunks whilst, at the same time, finds me wanting to slam the covers shut and walk away. For a good first half, Rijenveld's creation glued me to this tale of an unravelling farming family, devastated by the death of their eldest son (Matthies) and told from the perspective of his oldest sister, Jas.

Like DBC Pierre in Vernon God Little , Rijenveld moulds words and phrases onto the page with such eccentric singularity as to create stark scenes which emblazoned themselves upon my mind: crows fly up and look "like streaks of mascara through" Jas' tears; cheeks fill with colour like "the circles after multiple choice questions"; death feels "as indigestible as the lost tiger nut...after a birthday party behind a chair" and her mother's lips purse "shut, like mating slugs". Jas doesn't like observations because they're as "persistent as when a butter brush covered in cheese wax falls onto your clothes-almost impossible to wash out" and yet she remains watchful at all times; desperate to claw back her parents and her family from the brink of collapse; "Now that Mum has got thinner and her dresses baggier, I'm afraid she'll die soon and that Dad will go with her. I follow them about all day so that they can't suddenly die and disappear. I always keep them in the corner of my eye, like the tears for Matthies."

Inevitably, no amount of wakefulness or surveillance can offset the decline and, though she bundles herself inside her winter coat (for comfort or defence?) Jas is powerless. So, as their parents retreat, Jas and her two siblings act out increasingly unsettling explorations of death and the physical sensations associated with life. And this is where I felt the book deteriorate. With the children left to their own devices, their behaviour displays traits that would make William Goulding's (Lord of the Flies) eyes water.

At one point, Jas observes; "I love the texture of strawberries, the little seeds and the hairs on the inside of my mouth. Textures calm me down. Textures create unity, they keep something together what would collapse otherwise." And perhaps that, for me, is the downfall of the last third of the novel: the monotony of the peculiarly sexual behaviours displayed by the children gradually reduced their shock factor (though not my discomfort at reading them) and added no new perspective or texture to the tale.

A new voice? Yes. Memorable? Yes. Uncomfortable, explicit and alarming? YES. A book I'd recommend? With reservation, I think.

My thanks to netgalley, The author and the publisher for sharing an advanced copy with me in return for my honest opinion.

This is such a hard book to review - I appreciated and disliked it in equal measure. 10-year-old Jas, the narrator, has a unique voice which grabbed me from the start. Growing up on a farm in the Netherlands, family life is guided by the conservative 'blackstocking' Reformist church. When her oldest brother dies, the family's grief is swallowed - and all-pervasive.

Rijneveld is a poet, which is very clear through their writing - their observations are acute and striking. The atmosphere, indeed the family's whole world, is heavy with sadness and you long for someone to give these kids a hug. The 'earthiness' of farm life, however, is taken to another level, and incestuous acts and the children's obsession with death make this a very uncomfortable read.

Thanks to Faber and Faber Ltd and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This powerful, compelling novel, is a tour de force of the imagination of its wonderous author, Marieke Lucas Rijneveld. 'The Discomfort of Evening' is quite simply a modern day classic of literary fiction. Grief is the novel's signature theme, but what seems to defy ordinary prose is transformed into something immediate and powerful by the storytelling magic of Rijneveld. Indeed, this richly textured, viscerally immediate and luminous story is something felt and experienced rather than read - the conscious act of following words on the page usurped by a profound meditation on death that is a profoundly somatic experience. It is present in every dying cell and overworked organ. Death, the ultimate marker of a finite lifespan, in this book, is experienced by the living and the dead. It is ugly, dirty, dark and disgusting. Ten-year-old Jas is our cipher for the events of the book, a unique voice, which in a sense is a silent voice, a story told through feelings, and a material connection to the world that is as multisensory as it is inextricably intertwined with the physical experiences of the individual human body The story of Jas and her unique perspective on earthly events constitutes a coming of age story with a difference; but the rich microcosm of one family's experience of the whole gamut of human emotions also reflects one of the most moving and penetrating analyses of the human condition I have ever read.

A must-read. Absolutely stunning.

Along with ‘The Wasp Factory’ (Iain Banks) and ‘The Cement Garden’ (Ian McEwan) this debut novel is shocking and gripping, disturbing and uncomfortable
Narrator Jas is twelve and lives with her devout Dutch Reformed Church family who work a dairy farm. When older brother Matties falls through the ice in a pre-Christmas skating competition, the family collapses completely.
Craving affection and with a pathological fear of death, Jas becomes increasingly repressed and turns inwards. The reader is launched into the most intimate corners of her brain, her emotions and her body.
Rijneveld captures these dark places in fantastical, sometimes visceral and gross imagery. Her vocabulary is sexual and scatalogical. There is cruelty and abuse, filth and smells and an overarching obsessive fear of death.
Many thanks to #faber and #NetGalley for my pre-release English translation (Michele Hutchinson)of a novel nominated for the International Booker Prize 2020

It's a powerful but very disturbing book. I'd recommend reading positive and negative reviews about it before reading because it's definitely not everyone's gem. It wasn't so much mine. I appreciate the talent and the powerful writing, but I can't really say I enjoyed such content. So, I settled on a 3 star.

Thanks a lot to the publisher and NG for this copy.

To start with, I found this a very powerful insight into the dynamics of a family and their descent into degradation after the loss of the eldest child. The writing is excellent, there is no doubt about that but, as the narrative became darker - and more disgusting - I began to feel repelled. Hard to believe this is a tale set in modern times - someone must have noticed all was not right. Not sure if I'll read another by this author.

The Discomfort of Evening by Marielle Lucas Rijneveld deals with the emotions of losing a loved one. We see how a family disintegrates following the death of the first born of the family. The story is told by Jans the ten year old sister. The author takes the reader to very dark places that make the book so uncomfortable to read but intersperses it with biblical quotations as a way of lessening the impact.

Glorious. Hideous. Shameful. Beautiful.

This book is incredible.

I don't think I've ever had such a physical, visceral reaction the the ending of a book. Read it, read it now, and when it makes you feel like you need to stop reading - and it will - keep going.

Nominated for the International Booker Prize 2020
In this grim, claustrophobic novel, Marieke Lucas Rijneveld masterfully evokes an increasing sense of doom - on this Dutch farm, the apocalypse is nearing. Our narrator and main character is 10-year-old Jas who grows up in a strict religious family who owns a dairy farm. When she detects signs that her father might slaughter her favorite rabbit, she begs God to take her older brother instead - the plea of a child momentarily upset by her sibling. But then, the brother really drowns, the parents are paralyzed by grief, their marriage is under duress, the mother gets depressed, the farm is (also due to circumstances beyond their agency) in decline, and Jas and her two remaing siblings are more or less left to their own devices and their inability to deal with the loss of the brother.

The story gradually becomes more and more graphic and frequently rather disgusting (which is of course intentional): From the harsh reality of stock rearing to children torturing and killing animals, children being molested, harming themselves and others and experimenting with their developing sexuality, this novel is not for the faint of heart. The pastor in the novel says: "Discomfort is good. In discomfort we are real.", and Rijneveld tests this theory on their readers.

The parents hold on to their religion to explain and make sense of their experiences, to deal with reality, and the children also cling to narrative frameworks when seeking direction: For them, religion is also an important frame of reference, but Jas also invokes Anne Frank, she contemplates what she might have in common with Hitler (Jas, just like the author, has the same date of birth as the dictator), she plays mind games about Jews hiding in their cellar, she obsesses over the fairy tale of Rapunzel, and she relates to TV star Dieuwertje Blok. Again and again, we hear about dangling ropes on the compound, and we get lots and lots of info on Jas' constipation. Lego bricks and The Sims are recurring motifs, games that focus on building new worlds, and Jas dreams of leaving the farm (which, in a way, her brother has done...). Jas' coat (which features prominently on the cover) becomes her armor, and she doesn't take it off anymore.

Rijneveld grew up in a reformed farming family in North Brabant and still does some work on a dairy farm. Their own 12-year-old brother was run over by a bus when they were a young child, so this book can probably be read as a roman à clef about the author, a fictional autobiography. You can learn more about this fascinating, talented Dutch writer here and here.

I can see why this novel is lauded, but I have to admit that for me, reading it turned into a chore after around 15%. The book finds intense, unsettling images to discuss grief, trauma and the dark urges of adolescence, but personally, I didn't find it emotionally immersive, but rather exhausting to read. The vibe of the book and especially the shocking ending reminded me of another debut originally written in Dutch, Lize Spit's bestseller Het smelt - although de facto not excessively long, it felt like a very, very long book that spelt out its descriptions and motifs over and over again.

So all in all, this is a very impressive, effective novel, but it's not the kind of literature I personally enjoy.

(The book is also available in German: Was man sät)

Every now and then the publishing world believes it's found a new literary wunderkind – someone whose prose and voice is so daringly original it breaks the mould of fiction. Marieke Lucas Rijneveld is being touted as such a writer. Born in 1991, Rijneveld has previously published a book of poetry which led a Dutch newspaper to declare her the literary talent of the year. “The Discomfort of Evening” is their debut novel and has also been acclaimed in the Netherlands having been nominated for the Libris Literature Prize and won the ANV Debut Prize. And now it's been longlisted for the Booker International Prize. Rijneveld identifies as “in between” genders and their reputation as a fresh and cool new literary talent is also enhanced by the fact that they continue to work at the dairy farm where they were raised in between giving public poetry performances.

“The Discomfort of Evening” follows the story of ten year old Jas who (like the author) is also raised on a dairy farm and whose elder brother Matthies dies in a tragic accident. We follow her life over a couple of her years while her family wrestle with the grief of his loss and the tragic consequences of Foot-and-mouth disease which leads to the enforced decimation of much of their livestock. More than this, the novel is about the bizarre discoveries and transformations which accompany adolescence as Jas and her surviving brother and sister explore their emerging sexuality and the contours of their imaginations. Jas has her own curious peculiarities including a red coat she constantly wears and refuses to take off, the frogs she keeps under her bed in the hope they will mate and a secret belief she maintains that she's both a paedophile and Hitler. She also believes her mother hides Jewish people in their basement. It's the kind of weird logic which forms when a burgeoning awareness of history and the facts of the world are translated through an adolescent sensibility.

While Rijneveld undoubtably presents a refreshing point of view, their writing actually strongly reminds me of Jane Bowles, a writer from the mid-20th century who was another original (and sadly mostly forgotten) literary voice. Bowles' novel “Two Serious Ladies” explored the peculiarities of adolescent experience and a descent into debauchery. Both authors present a decidedly non-saccharine view of childhood filled with intense unwieldy emotions, religious fervour and dangerous play. Jas' parents are devoutly Christian and her actions becomes mixed with a spiritual feeling as she and her brother Obbe perform outlandish and sometimes terrifying rituals to invoke their lost brother Matthies. As Jas states when putting her sister Hanna through a weird initiation she feels “this isn’t a game, it’s deadly serious.”

I appreciated Jas' offbeat point of view, but a difficulty in representing her adolescent impressions of the world so comprehensively is that occasionally wondrous bouts of childhood experience can be mixed with long periods of banality. Subsequently, I felt a bit bored when reading sections of this novel. As someone who grew up in a rural area I understand such aimless wandering, interacting with nature and toying with the power of the imagination, but seeing it extensively represented can feel less meaningful and aimless. Also, there's a lot of blunt representation of issues like constipation and sexual experimentation between the children which just felt unsavoury to read about. I'm not prudish but there's only so much I want to read about a girl struggling to defecate. And when Jas' friend submits to a horrendous act of sexual violation this traumatic experience is simply dropped in and the consequences aren't dealt with. This left me with mixed feelings about the novel and that it wasn't crafted as well as it could have been.

What I found most meaningful was some of the simple imagery which would recur throughout Jas' story. A rope shaped into a noose is hung over Jas' bed like a grim reminder that death could take her or her siblings at any time just as it took Matthies. There are also occasional reminders of the brother's absence which strike the family in unexpected moments like seeing Matthies' jacket still hanging alongside their own jackets: “Death has its own coat hook here.” I also appreciated the way the parents' actions reflect an unexpressed grief such as the mother who steadily loses weight and the father who continuously threatens to leave their home. It's poignant how in her adolescent confusion Jas flirts with the idea of death as a way of coming to grips with Matthies' absence – especially because her parents don't talk about emotions directly. Unfortunately the ending of this novel reaches for an unnecessarily dramatic climax which detracts from the books subtler qualities. Overall, I agree that Rijneveld is an exciting new voice in fiction but I think they need more time to refine the raw power of their prose.

I am not sure what to say about this book. It is an uncomfortable read. It is about a family that is trying to cope with the death of their son. It is unlike anything that I have read before and I will not be recommending it.

I wanted to read this book due to its longlisting for the Booker International Prize. It also has 5 star reviews from some of my Goodreads friends.

However, after the first approximately 100 pages, I have realised that this is simply not a book for me and I will not be finishing it.

I recommend people to read the reviews by others who have rated this book highly. It is clearly a book that generates a reaction one way or another.

Due to my view being negative, and because I have not actually finished the book, I will not share this review more widely than NetGalley.

The Discomfort of Evening is a tough read. A story of grief in a religious farming family at the turn of this century, three children mourning their brother resort to cruelty and ritual to deal with their unspoken feelings. Our narrator, Jas, is going through puberty and sex is something she only understands from observing the cows and the animals around the farm. The parents (in great emotional pain themselves), refuse to answer any questions or talk about their dead son who creating a silent, damaging environment for the remaining siblings. Add an outbreak of foot and mouth disease to this grim mix, and the resulting narrative is very dark and hard to read. I often read if I wake in the night, but I couldn’t read this in the hours of darkness as it was too disturbing. Having said all of that, it is an impressive book. Several times I almost abandoned it, but Jas’ voice and the quality of the writing kept me reading.

It's become a reviewer's cliché to describe a book as 'dark', but wow, this one deserves the epithet! It's grim and gritty, grubby in places, awash with nauseating images and acts and yet still amounts to a clear-eyed and compelling picture of a family dislocated and destroyed not just by grief, but by a failure to acknowledge and articulate it.

It's been a while since I read a contemporary piece of lit fic which is built so securely on a sub-structure of figurative language and imagery that also becomes visceral and material: Jas, our child-narrator, is not just filled with grief and anxiety but actualises it by becoming bloated physically by her refusal to let it out. Navigating the difficult territory of adolescence while her family implodes before her eyes means that she confuses her natural curiosity about sex with the repressed violence that emerges from thwarted grief.

The child narrator is an established trope of the novel, filtering the world through a consciousness that is limited in its knowledge, around which we peer to see a world s/he cannot yet fully comprehend, and Rijneveld pulls off this literary feat with aplomb: Jas could so easily have been an adorably quirky character if her personality and wild imagination hadn't been diverted by guilt and anxiety. Instead, this is a study of vulnerability, of a child trying so hard to hold onto and control her life.

At various points this reminded me of other texts: the early short stories of Ian McEwan, Merricat in 'We Have Always Lived in the Castle'. The writing is deft and admirably controlled, and the translation natural and unobtrusive. There were just two minor jarring moments: when the translator uses the term 'broiled', an Americanism, when other inflections were English ('mum', 'willies'), and when the author compares earthworms to strawberry shoelaces - surely the manufacturers are careful that earthworms are the last thing sweet shoelaces look like?!

Overall, though, this is a tour de force, and one which refuses to look away from the material realities of life whether the scatological or the ever-presence of death or the actualities of farming. Jas' narrative voice is strong and characterful, just be aware that this book will take you to discomfiting places - I can already imagine the ranty 1-star reviews on Amazon should this win the International Booker!

“Death announces itself in most cases, but we’re often the ones who don’t want to see or hear it. We knew that the ice was too weak in some places, and we knew the foot-and-mouth wouldn’t skip our village."

<b>Book 6/13 for me from the International Booker longlist. </b>

De avond is ongemak was a bestselling debut novel by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, published when they were 26, and has been translated from the Dutch as The Discomfort of Evening by Michele Hutchison.

The novel is begins just before Christmas 2000 and is narrated by Jas who begins the novel:

"I was ten and stopped taking off my coat. That morning, Mum had covered us one by one in udder ointment to protect us from the cold."

She lives with her parents, her older brothers Matthies and Obbe and her younger sister Hanna on the family diary farm:

“No one stood a chance against the cows anyway; they were always more important.”

She is worried her father is fattening up her pet rabbit Dieuwertje (“I’d named him after the curly-haired female presenter on children’s TV because I found her so pretty.” - that being Dieuwertje Blok, who rather marvellously, narrated the Dutch audiobook https://twitter.com/mariek1991/status/981457382223081474).

And Matthies is “ going on ahead to the lake where he was going to take part in the local skating competition with a couple of his friends. It was a twenty-mile route, and the winner got a plate of stewed udders with mustard and a gold medal with the year 2000 on it”, but when she asks to come with him he refuses “and then more quietly so that only I could hear it, ‘Because we’re going to the other side.’ ‘I want to go to the other side, too,’ I whispered. ‘I’ll take you with me when you’re older.’”

As he leaves Jas ponders:”I thought about being too small for so much, but that no one told you when you were big enough, how many centimetres on the door-post that was, and I asked God if He please couldn’t take my brother Matthies instead of my rabbit. ‘Amen. “

Matthies is indeed taken – the local vet comes to break the news that, skating where he shouldn’t, Matthies fell through the ice and drowned, and the family is devastated. Her parents retreat into silence, Jas can’t quite comprehend his death

The cancelling of the family festivities and taking down of the Christmas tree strikes her more than the news: “It was only then that I felt a stab in my chest, more than at the vet’s news. Matthies was sure to return but the Christmas tree wouldn’t.”. And her denial includes refusing to take off her coat, which she wears continuously for months, and self-imposed severe constipation: “I could hold in my poo. I wouldn’t have to lose anything I wanted to keep from now on.”

These events have echoes of the authors own life, except they were only three when their brother died in a car accident:

<blockquote>Mijn eigen broer Arjen was twaalf toen hij verongelukte. Ik was net drie en ik begreep niet hoe hij ineens zomaar weg was. Alles werd meteen anders. Er werd amper over zijn dood gepraat en mijn ouders haalden onmiddellijk de kerstboom weg. Kinderen snappen dat niet; zodra je zo’n boom verwijdert, wordt het nóg nadrukkelijker dat er iets ergs aan de hand is.

My own brother Arjen was twelve when he died in an accident. I was just three years old and I didn't understand how he suddenly disappeared. Everything immediately changed. There was hardly any mention of his death and my parents immediately removed the Christmas tree. Children don't understand that; as soon as you remove such a tree, it becomes even more emphatic that something bad is going on.</blockquote>

(From https://www.ad.nl/utrecht/als-ik-schrijf-weet-ik-wie-ik-ben~aa4f625c/ - Google translation)

Marieke Lucas Rijneveld was previously known as a poet, and has explained in interviews (https://www.volkskrant.nl/cultuur-media/me-alleen-lucas-noemen-zou-ik-een-te-grote-stap-vinden-maar-ik-word-nooit-meer-alleen-marieke~b62d2ce7/) how, in their view, the move to prose required them to both master dialogue, but also introduce more scatological elements (“Maar in een roman moet er af en toe ook gewoon iemand even gaan poepen of een boterham met kaas eten” = “But in a novel, now and then someone just has to poop or eat a cheese sandwich”), and cites as her inspiration the novelist Jan Wolkers, who is also quoted in the epigraph (“Hij schreef wat hij wilde schrijven, over seks, het geloof, over alles” = “He wrote what he wanted to write about sex, faith, about everything.”)

Faith plays a key role – Jas’s parents, as the authors own, are members of the Reformed Church. Her own relationship with God is complicated, but her language, and that of the novel, is inflected with scripture: “I’ve got so many words but it’s as if fewer and fewer come out of me, while the biblical vocabulary in my head is pretty much bursting at the seams. “

Jas’s upbringing is strict. The television is hidden away in a cabinet as something shameful and even when watched the content is controlled, and ideally confined to the wholesome Dieuwertje Blok:

“We didn’t have any of the commercial channels, only Nederland 1, 2 and 3. Dad said there wasn’t any nudity on them. He pronounced the word ‘nudity’ as though a fruit fly had just flown into his mouth–he spat as he said it.”

Popular music is generally frowned upon, although an exception is made for Boudewijn de Groot, even her mother unable to avoid joining in with Land van Maas en Waal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOKwT8D6XmY

And the death of their son only causes her parents to retreat further “everything that requires secrecy here is accepted in silence”, leaving the children to learn the facts of life themselves and to experiment with violence and sexual feelings, and the imaginative Jas to fantasise about the mysterious ‘other side’ of the lake and (bizarrely) that her mother has hidden some refugees from Hitler (whose birthday Jas shares) in the cellar:

“Anything can happen, I think then, but nothing can be prevented. The plan about death and a rescuer, Mum and Dad who don’t lie on top of each other any more, Obbe who is growing out of his clothes faster than Mum can learn the washing labels off by heart, and the way not just his body is growing but also his cruelty; the ticking insects in my belly which make me rock on top of my teddy bear and get out of bed exhausted, or why we don’t have crunchy peanut butter any more, why the sweets tin has grown a mouth with Mum’s voice in it that says, ‘Are you sure you want to do that?’ or why Dad’s arm has become like a traffic barrier: it descends on you whether you wait your turn or not; or the Jewish people in the basement that no one talks about, just like Matthies. Are they still alive? “

And as the novel progresses into 2001, further tragedy strikes, as foot and mouth disease spreads from the UK to the Netherlands. The quote that opens by review feels particularly chilling read in February 2020 as Covid-19 spreads around the world.

Highly recommended and a contender to win the overall prize. Thanks to the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC.

An English-language interview with the author:
https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/48140/1/marieke-lucas-rijneveld-interview-the-discomfort-of-evening