The Discomfort of Evening
Netherlands

The Discomfort of Evening

by Lucas Rijneveld

Family & Heritage Literary Fiction Horror Fiction 2020

Summary

Ten-year-old Jas lives with her deeply religious family on a dairy farm in the rural Netherlands. Her world is shaped by strict religious beliefs, the rhythms of farm life and the unspoken rules governing her family. When her older brother Matthies dies in an accident, Jas struggles to understand the loss and begins to believe that her childhood prayer may somehow have caused his death. As grief settles over the household, her parents withdraw into their own suffering, leaving Jas and her siblings increasingly isolated. Unable to express her fear and confusion directly, Jas retreats into a disturbing inner world filled with strange fantasies, bodily anxieties and dark imaginings. Through the child’s unsettling perspective, Rijneveld portrays a family gradually disintegrating under the weight of unprocessed grief and religious guilt. The novel’s vivid, often shocking imagery captures the vulnerability of childhood and the desperate search for meaning when familiar structures of belief and family life begin to collapse. Winner of the 2020 International Booker Prize, the novel is a haunting exploration of loss, repression and the limits of understanding.

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Country
Netherlands
Europe
About the author
Lucas Rijneveld
Lucas Rijneveld

Lucas Rijneveld, born in 1991 in the Dutch province of North Brabant, is a Dutch novelist and poet. They grew up in a strict Reformed Christian farming family, an upbringing that has influenced the rural settings, religious tensions and unsettling emotional landscapes of their fiction. Rijneveld studied at a teacher-training college and worked on a dairy farm while developing their literary career. Their first poetry collection, Calf’s Caul (Kalfsvlies), appeared in 2015 and won the C. Buddingh’ Prize for the best Dutch-language poetry debut. Their first novel, The Discomfort of Evening (De avond is ongemak), was published in 2018 and received the ANV Debut Prize. In 2020, Rijneveld and translator Michele Hutchison jointly won the International Booker Prize for the English translation, making Rijneveld the first Dutch author to receive the award. Their second novel, My Heavenly Favourite (Mijn lieve gunsteling, 2020), further established their reputation for psychologically intense and formally distinctive fiction. Rijneveld’s writing explores grief, sexuality, religion, power and the uneasy relationship between imagination and reality.

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Details
Published
2020
Author
Lucas Rijneveld