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A Novel
by Lucas Rijneveld
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, 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, he asks: 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.
Booker Prize, 2020
"The effects of the unspeakable grief felt by 10-year-old Jas' family after the death of her beloved older brother are explored in painful and painstaking detail in this startling debut novel... . Rijneveld's extraordinary narrator describes a small world of pain which is hard to look at and harder to ignore." ―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Rijneveld's International Booker Prize–shortlisted debut is not a novel for those expecting triumphal outcomes. Readers who can persist through the agonies of a family falling apart, however, will find their breath taken away by Rijneveld's prose as filtered through Hutchison's deft translation." ―Booklist (starred review)
"Rijneveld's head-turning debut, a bestseller in their native Netherlands and a Booker International Prize nominee, puts a contemporary spin on classic wrath-of-God literature... . the translation's soaring lyricism offers mercy for the reader." ―Publishers Weekly
"This childhood narrative of overwhelming grief, religious insanity, death and incest, cruelty and despair, is felt in the gut as much as it is in the heart... . The novel's power resides not in its ability to stun, but rather in the compressed grace of the author's plain style―lucidly conveyed by the translator Michele Hutchison―which conjures up a hermetically sealed reality and an adolescent protagonist so believable and unguarded that from the outset we feel her closeness and fear for her safety." ―The Wall Street Journal
"Impressive... . It is the strange, haunting observations through which the child, Jas, tries to make sense of the grown-up world that gives this novel of grief its particular power. A book to read―and to remember." ―The Economist
"The most talked-about debut novel of 2020 already... . Absolutely compelling... . Brutal and vivid." ―Dazed (UK)
"Translator Michele Hutchison deftly switches between registers and gives Jas a strong, unique voice ... [with] poetic, mannered language, realistic bleakness and descent into surreal darkness." ―The Guardian(UK)
"Remarkable... . Confident in its brutality, yet contained rather than gratuitous, [The Discomfort of Evening] introduces readers to both a memorably off-key narrator and a notable new talent." ―The Observer (UK)
"Thanks to a fine translation by Michele Hutchison, English readers can experience the novel's heady imagery and sensory language ... . A visceral portrait of a devout family dealing with grief and the result is both haunting and beautiful." ―Monocle (UK)
"The electricity in this book comes from the use of that blank narrative style to deliver a sort of Grand Guignol grotesquerie." ―The Times (UK)
"This is Rijneveld in short: an earthy and irreverent new voice, thrillingly uninhibited in style and subject matter... . The spaciousness of Rijneveld's imagination comes as terror and solace. That lack of squeamishness, that frightening extremity, which, in Hutchison's clean, calm translation, never feels showy or manipulative, gives full voice to the enormity of the children's grief, their obscene deprivation." ―Parul Sehgal, The New York Times
This information about The Discomfort of Evening was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Lucas Rijneveld grew up in a Reformed farming family in North Brabant before moving to Utrecht. He is the author of The Discomfort of Evening, which was the first Dutch book to win the International Booker Prize, as well as three poetry collections.
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