Today, I go to a book from the Booker International list of 2020. I pick this as it was a book we all in the shadow Jury felt would be on the longlist. But I also have the last book from Lucas Rijneveld, as he is now called, as he was the first trans writer to win the prize. The novel took six years to write.

I was pleased when this made the Booker longlist. I have long been a fan of Dutch Lit, so when I had the chance to review a book from one of the rising stars of Dutch Lit, Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, it first came to my notice with a poetry collection that won a prize. She grew up religious in the North Brabant area of The Netherlands, a large dairy farming area. Her middle name was initially a fantasy friend when she was growing up but in her late teens, she took the name to show her as an intermediate person. The Discomfort of Evening is her debut novel; like the main character, she also lost a sibling growing up.

When ten years old, Jas loses her older brother, one of her five siblings, through a skating accident. At this point, her world starts to fall apart. She is on the cusp of being a teen discovering her body but also struggling with the loss of her brother. From believing her family is hiding Jews in the cellar, the aftermath of Foot and Mouth is still felt in the community. Times are hard for the family. These are dark times. From toads under her bed to strange events with cows on the farm, Jas tries to bring her brother back and help her siblings. As her mother stops eating, the father buries his head on the farm. Matthies is dead, and they can’t mention him as the family struggles. This is a portrait of a meltdown viewed from the eyes of a ten-year-old but a ten-year-old with a weird way of dealing with her grief herself. This is a slow unravelling of a family through grief. It is heartbreakingly dark and mesmerizing at times. In the hinterlands of Holland, a ten-year-old narrates as her family falls apart from the loss of the eldest son.

The parents are there but aren’t there. This takes the book into a similar territory to books like Lord of the Flies. As Jas, her sister, and her brother start to do things that are strange and odd rituals, touching animals and touching each other, as they have no outlet for their grief, their actions turn. As they grapple with the cusp of adulthood and also sexual awakening tinged with disbelief at loss, they add to the odd world. I was reminded of Gerbrand Bakker twin in the setting, a dairy farm in the hinterlands of Holland, also dealing with death. But this is a darker book than that. It is brutal. Death is never far away. As anyone who has grown up in the countryside, nature and farming can sometimes be ruthless. What are your thoughts on these books? I reviewed this as part of a Boken Week tour. This book was based on the writer’s own history some and for that is even more powerful.

The writer

TTr

Lucas Rijneveld (b. 1991) grew up in a Reformed farming family in North Brabant before moving to Utrecht. One of the greatest new voices in Dutch literature, his first poetry collection, Calf’s Caul, was awarded the C. Buddingh’ Prize for best poetry debut in 2015, with the newspaper de Volkskrant naming him literary talent of the year. In 2018, Atlas Contact published his first novel, The Discomfort of Evening, which won the prestigious ANV Debut Prize and was a national bestseller. The UK edition won the Booker International Prize 2020. Alongside his writing career, Rijneveld works on a dairy farm.

Translator

Michele Hutchison (b. 1972) is a literary translator from Dutch and French into English. As a former commissioning editor at various top publishing houses, she has translated more than twenty books from Dutch and one from French. Recent literary translations include ’La Superba’ by Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer, ’Roxy’ by Esther Gerritsen, and Fortunate Slaves by Tom Lanoye. In 2020, Michele won the Vondel Translation Prize for her translation of ‘Stage Four’ by Sander Kollaard and the International Booker Prize together with author Marieke Lucas Rijneveld for ‘The Discomfort of Evening’.

Post written by Stuart Allen

This post is by guest curator Stuart Allen, the blogger behind the blog, Winstonsdad. Stuart is a lover of translated literature and world cinema. He started the #translationthurs hashtag on Twitter and his blog is rated the #1 translated literature blog in the world by Feedspot.