According to the pastor, discomfort is good. In discomfort we are real.
The Discomfort of Evening — winner of the International Booker Prize for 2020 — is a tough book to read: told from the perspective of a young girl whose family is mired in grief and ongoing tragedy, the details are focussed on the visceral, the scatalogical; there is prepubescent sexual exploration that borders on abuse; parental control and neglect and threats of suicide; animal torture and culling; bullying, desperation, isolation; so much muck and pain and ugliness that I wanted to turn away from. But centered as it is on a time and place that I wasn’t familiar with (a dairy farm in the Dutch “Bible Belt” in the early 2000s), and based somewhat on actual events from author Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s own life, there’s an authenticity of voice and situation that drew me on. Known foremost as a poet, Rijneveld writes evocative sentences, and there’s no denying that I found the plotline compelling, but I can’t help but feeling like the author gratuitously pushed the details to the limits of what a reader could stomach (like Ottessa Moshfegh verging into Chuck Palahniuk territory) and this certainly wouldn’t be for everyone; I can’t really say that it was for me but it does feel worthwhile in the end. (Spoilery from here, but not much beyond the book’s blurb.)
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.
As the book opens, the main character is forced to remain at home while her beloved older brother leaves for a skating contest on the local lake, and in a moment of spite, she asks God to spare her rabbit from the Christmas dinner table and take her brother instead. When Matthies falls through a hole in the ice that day and drowns, the entire family is thrown into a state of despair that they can't move beyond. As for our main character: I didn’t learn until after I was finished that the name “Jas” (that suddenly appears about halfway through the book) is actually Dutch for “coat or jacket” and is mockingly used for this little girl who refuses to take off the red winter coat that she had been wearing the last time she saw Matthies alive. For the next two years, Jas — suffering from burdensome magical thinking ever since the bargain with God that killed her brother — will fill her coat pockets with totems and artefacts meant to keep the rest of her family safe. As people at school and out in the community begin to remark on the stink of the coat (and the bizarreness of it being worn day after day), it was a wonder to me that Jas’ parents didn’t even seem to notice it — but then again, neither of them seem to notice much beyond their own pain:
Mum is growing limper, just like the frozen beans. Sometimes she lets things fall from her hands and blames us. I said the Lord’s Prayer five times today. The last two times I kept my eyes open to keep watch on everything around me. I hope Jesus understands — cows sleep with one eye open so they can’t suddenly be attacked. I can’t help being more and more afraid of everything that could take me by surprise in the night: from a mosquito to God.
As farming members of a rural Dutch Reformed Church, the family has always lived modestly and frugally (and attended church services regularly; three times on Sundays), but following Matthies’ death, even small treats are banished from the home. When the mother stops eating, Jas and her remaining brother and sister start performing bizarre “missions” meant to keep their parents alive (while Jas and Hanna secretly dream of a Rapunzel-style rescue to “the other side”). When foot-and-mouth disease then ravages Holland and the family’s dairy herd must be destroyed, even the stolid patriarch is finally brought low:
He asks me if I still remember the story of the man who got on his bike one day and rode to the edge of the world. As he was cycling he discovered that his brakes didn’t work, which was a relief to him because now he couldn’t stop for anything or anyone. The good man cycles off the edge of the world and tumbles and tumbles, the way he’s been tumbling all his life, but now there’s no end to it. That’s what death will feel like — like an endless fall without getting back up again, without plasters. I hold my breath. The story has frightened me a bit. Hanna and I folded bottle tops around the spokes of Dad’s bike so he couldn’t secretly go after the man. I didn’t realize until later that Dad was the man. Dad was the one tumbling.
The parental neglect that Jas suffers, compounded by her own grief and guilt and need to protect her remaining family members, results in chronic constipation, ritualistic self-abuse, and some obsessive sexual curiosity and experimentation (there is plenty of snot and poop and pus and [mostly bull] semen in these pages). Her older brother and younger sister are also flailing and acting strangely, but with childish naivete and magical thinking, Jas believes that the items in her pockets (and the infected pin in her belly button and the bucket of toads under her desk) will somehow keep the family intact:
We still have our missions which have been keeping us on our feet until now, even though Obbe’s half lying on the damp earth, looking back at me, unmoved. I shuffle my welly awkwardly back and forth over the ground and become aware of goose bumps on my arms. The elastic of my pyjama bottoms is baggy around my waist. Obbe jumps to his feet; there’s still a trace of tears on his face. He pats the mud from his striped pyjamas. The thing that moves us will finally cause us to fall apart like a chunk of crumbly cheese.
I learned after finishing The Discomfort of Evening that, like Jas, the author was raised on a dairy farm, was a member of the strict Dutch Reformed Church, and lost an older brother as a child. I have no idea if Rijneveld’s family suffered to the degree described in the novel (I will note that foot-and-mouth disease did strike the Netherlands in early 2001 and must have added stress on their farm), but as off-putting as the details are, the overall story is affecting and relatable; Jas’ voice is credibly childlike and evoked a maternal protectiveness in me — even if the story also evoked disgust and, yes, discomfort. Perhaps, in the end, even if I didn’t much like this book, I wasn’t meant to; perhaps being made to feel anything in this cynical world is a success.
Every loss contains all previous attempts to hang on to something you didn’t want to lose but had to let go of anyway, from a marble bag filled with the most beautiful marbles and rare shooters, to my brother. We find ourselves in loss and we are who we are — vulnerable beings, like stripped starling chicks that fall naked from their nests and hope they’ll be picked up again.
