Lucas Rijneveld

In the Mind of a Child

It’s as if Rijneveld had to get it all out there before they forgot. The Discomfort of Evening draws upon many of Rijneveld‘s own experiences growing up on a bleak farm in the Netherlands around the turn of the century.

Jas is ten and her family is falling apart. The tight external structure of extreme religion is not enough to hold it together in the face of two tragic events in as many years. In fact regular visits of Church Elders and the extreme beliefs of the Dutch Reformed Church are stifling influences on the family. The parents distance themselves from each other and from the children. The.children are left in a vacuum. Schooling is intermittent. Jas is forced to fill in the gaps of the “why” of everything in order for her world to make sense.

From the accidental drowning of her older brother, the death of the farm cows who are euthanized due to an out break of foot and mouth disease, to witnessing the animal cruelty of her surviving brother, Jas has a mind full of explanations.

Told by her teacher to write a letter to Anne Frank, she’s confused. How can Anne read a letter? She finds out her birthday is the same date as Hitler’s (as is Rijneveld‘s) and fears she herself must be bad. She tells a Hitler joke at school, so off that it’s been excluded from the English translation.

At home at night she looks at the glow-in-the-light star stickers and peels one off and sticks it on her coat. She thinks there are Jews hiding in the basement and worries they aren’t getting enough food when her family falls on hard times after the cow disease.

She keeps toads under her desk hoping they will mate as this will mean her parents might and then her drowned brother will be replaced. She masturbates on her teddy bear and watches when her surviving brother does sexual acts with a coke can on her complicit younger sister. She tries to make sense of every little thing. She imagines teeth peeping up through the snow, teeth that have kept growing, the teeth of dead animals buried on the farm. Why would teeth not keep growing? she asks herself. When her drowned brother’s body is kept for days in a cooled coffin, she lifts the clear viewing lid to see if he’s warm. It’s Christmas time when he dies and the parents cancel Christmas. Her mother takes the Christmas decorations down and carries them to the basement where the Jews are living.

The paucity of Jax’s external life contrasts with her mind’s imaginative explanations. This juxtaposition of external and internal increases as the child Jas progresses though puberty where sexual ideation escalates.

The reader starts to enter Jan’s/ Rijneveld’s mind. If any thing even partly normal happens we are jolted out of it by something some horror. We enter a world we don’t want to be in.

Reading The Disturbance of Evening is an unnerving and enduring experience, but one I am honored that I was allowed into.… (altro)

Marieke Lucas Rijneveld's novel, THE DISCOMFORT OF EVENING, translated from the Dutch, caught my attention when I saw it short-listed for the Booker Prize. It is a very affecting coming of age story set in a small farming community in the Netherlands, narrated by a twelve year-old girl named Jas, whose devout Reform family is slowly coming apart following the accidental death of the older of two sons. Her father is devastated, her mother becomes emotionally distant and nearly stops eating. Jas's other older brother, Obbe, shows signs of sadism, torturing and killing small animals, and experimenting sexually with Jas and her precocious younger sister, Hannah. And Jas is feeling her own confused stirrings of budding sexuality. And then their dairy herd is stricken with hoof and mouth disease and must be destroyed (the description of which brought back a similar wrenching scene from HUD, the film adaptation of Larry McMurtry's Texas novel, HORSEMAN, PASS BY). I will tell you that the writing here is quite beautiful (although translated works always make me wonder who to praise), but the subject matter is almost unrelievedly grim, with an ending that is unexpected and shocking. This should probably earn a five-star rating, but I winced my way through so much of it that I cannot honestly say I enjoyed it. Even so, very highly recommended.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER… (altro)