title: De avond is ongemak by: Rijneveld, Marieke Lucas published: 2018-01-31 read: 2020-05 preview

A Booker Prize winner, The Discomfort of Evening; I had the advantage of being able to read the untranslated De Avond is Ongemak by Marieke Rijneveld.  It is about a farmer’s family, in rural Netherlands, suffering from Calvinism and poverty. And the main disastrous event.  I tell you: I’ve seen such people, I know them a bit, and I grew up in an area where you can think such a story happens.  So it struck a chord in me, this story, written from the view of the 10-year-old daughter who suffers between her older brother’s tragedy, her parents’ numbness, and her siblings’, yeah, what?  I could feel this book, it’s in my top ten now.  But, you need a thick skin.

So, Jas is the daughter in a farmer’s family, somewhere in the Netherlands. I can smell the cowshit, see the messy yard, and hear the simple but proud people. Not sure where the farm is, precisely, but it does not matter. Jas, her nickname since she always wears her jacket, is 10 and observing the absurdity of their life. Her brother drowns during ice skating; he simply does no longer return home.

The strongly protestant (read: Calvinist!) parents have no way of dealing with their loss. Indeed, they go as far as pretending it did not happen at all. It is never mentioned again, and Jas suffers from that. Then the mouth-and-foot disease arrives, and that grief works as a proxy for the real.

Jas refuses to take off her increasingly disgusting red coat, keeps a drawing pin stuck in her belly button and develops chronic constipation (can you feel the pain). Her brother, Obbe, obsessively bashes his head on his bedframe and starts killing animals, while her mother refuses to eat an ever-growing list of certain foods.

The book’s characters test the limits of bodily boundaries – their own, and others. Jas’s father shoves soap up her bum to make her poo; her sister sticks her tongue in Jas’s mouth, like “a leftover steak that Mum’s warmed up in the microwave”. Obbe sticks an artificial insemination gun into Jas’ friend Belle’s ass, and inseminates his lego figures.

The book is one massacre, with death, sexual and other bodily violence, loneliness, taboos.

As one knows, truth is stronger than fiction. And it is therefore not surprising to read that the author says, there are autobiographical elements in her book. She works at a dairy farm, lost a brother when she was 3, and has a religious background.

Don’t miss this book.