The Discomfort of Evening

Hot on the heels of The Children of Dynmouth, The Discomfort of Evening can be described as another utterly unique and original novel. It is unflinching in its brutality, but for all its shock and horror, perspective is provided for the reader, since it is a ten-year-old who is responsible for narrating the story. The framing device for the novel is the accidental death of a family's oldest child. What follows is how all its remaining members fall apart in the madness of their grief, compounded in the novel by it being set in a religious and rural Dutch farming community. No one is able to express what they truly feel; God's word is seemingly final. For Jas, the narrator, the horror of events is even worse — with only a child's understanding of the world. Her coming of age amidst the family's disintegration is therefore rendered even more poignant. Rijneveld writes economically, but her prose is powerful and her similes apposite and well deployed. Nothing is taboo, with Nazism, incest, paedophilia and bestiality all touched on in the course of the novel. Sometimes there is a slight tendency towards the heavy-handed (particularly the notion of Jews in the basement of Jas's house), but I was intrigued through to the end how The Discomfort of Evening would resolve itself. Nine out of ten.

By Marieke Lucas Rijneveld