The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s debut novel, The Discomfort of Evening, arrived in English translation in 2020 and promptly won the International Booker Prize, making Rijneveld, at twenty-nine, the youngest recipient of that award. The Dutch original, De avond is ongemak, appeared in 2018, and Michele Hutchison’s translation does not merely carry the novel across a language barrier. It carries the reader into a world of startling, at times suffocating sensory density. The novel is set on a strict Calvinist rabbit farm in the Dutch countryside and is narrated by Jas, a ten-year-old girl whose coat she refuses to remove after she makes a silent bargain with God that her rabbit, not her brother Matthies, will die. Matthies falls through the ice on a skating trip that same day. What follows is not a novel of grief in any conventional sense. It is a novel of what grief does to children who have no language for it, no permission to feel it, and no adults equipped to hold it.

Rijneveld writes with a directness that can feel brutal, but the brutality is always earned. Jas narrates in the present tense, close and unwavering, and the accumulation of farmyard detail, bodily sensation, religious dread, and childhood curiosity creates an atmosphere so thick it resists easy categorization. This is not a coming-of-age story in any redemptive sense. It is something older and stranger, closer to folk tale or fever dream, yet grounded in precise, specific reality. The rabbits, the soil, the cold, the Bible verses that hang over every meal like weather, the body’s alien demands on a child who does not understand them yet: all of it lands with the weight of the completely real. It is unlike anything else in contemporary European fiction, and that is not hyperbole. It is simply accurate.

Published by Faber and Faber in the UK, The Discomfort of Evening is the work of a writer who arrived fully formed, with an unmistakable voice and a genuine subject. The International Booker Prize jury was right to single it out. Readers willing to surrender to its terms will find a novel that stays in the body long after the last page.

Character Arcs

Jas is the novel’s entire consciousness, and Rijneveld never leaves her point of view, never grants the reader the relief of an external perspective that would contextualize or soften what Jas perceives. She is ten at the novel’s opening and moves through an indeterminate stretch of months in which her family dissolves without anyone acknowledging the dissolution. Her arc is not a journey toward understanding or recovery. It is a journey deeper into a private world of guilt, magical thinking, and the body’s insistent, confusing demands. She blames herself for Matthies’s death because of her silent bargain, and that guilt calcifies into something she carries inside her like a stone. Her relationship with her siblings, Obbe and Hanna, grows stranger and more disturbing as the novel progresses, the three children filling the vacuum left by their parents’ withdrawal with experiments that are by turns tender, curious, and deeply troubling. Her parents are not villains. They are people so thoroughly armored in religious endurance that they cannot reach their own children, and the novel understands this without excusing it. The farm’s animals, particularly the rabbits Jas tends, function as projections of her internal state, their fates entangled with her guilt and her secret bargains with God. The arc does not end cleanly. Jas does not heal. She survives, which in Rijneveld’s moral universe is both enough and not enough at all.

Pacing

The novel moves in close, dense chapters that accumulate rather than accelerate. Rijneveld is not interested in plot momentum in any conventional sense. The pacing is governed by Jas’s consciousness, which circles and doubles back, fixes on particular images and sensations with an intensity that distorts time. Certain scenes stretch to fill pages while weeks pass in a sentence. This rhythm can feel disorienting, particularly in the novel’s first third, where the density of detail requires patient attention. But the payoff is considerable. By the middle of the book, the reader inhabits Jas’s world so completely that the distorted time-sense feels natural, even necessary. The final quarter accelerates in a way that feels genuinely earned, the various threads of guilt, desire, and religious dread converging in a series of scenes that are among the most disturbing and most artistically precise in recent literary fiction. The pacing is inseparable from the novel’s meaning: to rush would be to falsify.

Deeper Thematic Exploration

Grief is the novel’s occasion, but its true subject is the damage inflicted on children by adults who cannot grieve. The Calvinist framework is not window dressing. It is the novel’s central pressure system, the belief structure that renders Jas’s parents unable to mourn, that transforms suffering into a test rather than an experience, that leaves three children alone in a landscape of religious language that explains nothing about what they actually feel. Rijneveld draws a precise portrait of how fundamentalist faith, when used as armor against emotion, does not protect children from the worst things but simply leaves them to face those things without guidance or witness. The body in the novel is insistently present, and Rijneveld treats childhood sexuality, curiosity, and the body’s animal demands with a frankness that some readers will find difficult. But this frankness is not gratuitous. It insists on the reality of children as embodied beings whose needs do not pause during family crisis, who seek comfort and sensation in the absence of what they actually require. The novel is also, at a deeper structural level, about the nature of bargains, the deals we make with forces we cannot control, and the weight of believing those deals real. Jas’s foundational guilt, the sense that she traded her brother’s life for her rabbit’s, organizes everything that follows and gives the novel its moral seriousness.

Style and Voice

Rijneveld’s prose, as rendered by Michele Hutchison, operates at the level of image and sensation rather than analysis. Jas does not interpret her experience; she reports it with a child’s literalness that is also a poet’s precision. The style is dense with agricultural and bodily detail, with the specific textures of farmyard life and Protestant Dutch domesticity, and with a vein of dark, unnerving humor that surfaces at unexpected moments and prevents the novel from becoming purely bleak. The sentences are often long and associative, one perception linking to another in a chain of logic that is internally consistent even when it is not rationally explicable. Rijneveld is also a published poet, and the prose carries that training: the ear for rhythm, the sensitivity to the weight of individual words, the willingness to let a single image carry more than it should by rights be able to carry. Hutchison’s translation deserves separate recognition. She has found English equivalents for Dutch idioms and cadences in ways that feel native rather than imported, and the register of Jas’s voice, that particular combination of childhood directness and latent terror, is consistent and controlled throughout.

Verdict

The Discomfort of Evening is a genuinely original novel, disturbing in the ways that serious literature should be disturbing: not for shock value, but because it looks directly at experiences most fiction prefers to soften or elide. Rijneveld’s portrait of childhood grief, guilt, and the body’s insubordinate demands in the context of strict religious farming life achieves something rare, a world so fully realized it seems to exist before and after the pages that contain it. It is not an easy read, and it does not want to be. It wants to be a true one. It succeeds completely. Five stars without hesitation.

FAQ

What is The Discomfort of Evening about?

The novel follows Jas, a ten-year-old girl on a strict Calvinist rabbit farm in the Netherlands, in the aftermath of her brother Matthies’s death in a skating accident. Jas blames herself because she made a silent bargain with God that her rabbit, not her brother, would die. The novel traces the family’s unraveling and Jas’s psychological descent through a dense, visceral first-person narration.

Who wrote The Discomfort of Evening and what awards has it won?

It was written by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, a Dutch author and poet, and translated into English by Michele Hutchison. It won the International Booker Prize in 2020, making Rijneveld the youngest winner in that prize’s history at the time of the award.

Is this novel suitable for sensitive readers?

Readers should be aware that the novel contains frank depictions of childhood sexuality, animal death, and psychological disturbance. Rijneveld handles all of these with artistic purpose rather than exploitation, but the content is genuinely difficult and the book makes no effort to cushion its subject matter.

How does the Calvinist setting shape the novel?

The strict Calvinist framework is central to the novel’s meaning. It creates a family culture in which grief is absorbed into religious endurance rather than expressed, leaving the children without adult guidance as the family dissolves. Religious language in the novel surrounds and fails the characters simultaneously, providing vocabulary that cannot touch actual experience.

What makes Michele Hutchison’s translation notable?

Hutchison’s translation preserves the novel’s dense, associative prose rhythm and the specific register of Jas’s child narrator with rare consistency. The English text reads as a native work rather than a translated one, which is the highest standard for literary translation, and Hutchison was jointly honored by the International Booker Prize alongside Rijneveld.

How does the novel handle grief differently from other literary fiction?

Rather than tracing grief as a process with recognizable stages or eventual resolution, Rijneveld presents it as something that happens to a family without being acknowledged, a pressure that deforms everyone from the inside while the surface of religious and agricultural routine continues. There is no catharsis, no healing arc, only survival and its costs.

Is The Discomfort of Evening part of a series?

No. It is a standalone novel. Rijneveld has since published a second novel, The Discomfort of Evening remains their debut fiction, and they continue to publish poetry. Each project is distinct in subject and approach.

What other books might appeal to readers of this novel?

Readers drawn to Rijneveld’s visceral, psychologically intense approach to childhood trauma might find common ground with Jenny Offill’s compressed emotional precision, with the rural darkness of Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13, or with the disturbing childhood interiority of Emma Donoghue’s Room. For European literary fiction with comparable strangeness and intensity, Han Kang’s The Vegetarian occupies similar emotional territory.