A review by paltrindome
The Discomfort of Evening by Lucas Rijneveld

challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.25

“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.” 
 
On a rural farm in the wintry Netherlands lives a family of six — ten-year-old Jas, her parents, and three siblings — defined by their unwavering faith in God and the simple agricultural life they have resigned themselves to. When the eldest son Matthies dies while ice skating, the family’s deceptively mundane and normal lives are shaken up as they suffer blow after blow compounding their dysfunctional relationships. At its core, The Discomfort of Evening is about grief, specifically the grief and trauma that haunt the family grappling with Matthies’ death, the foot-and-mouth disease that strikes their farm, and a seemingly unrelenting God they continue to worship. Jas’s mum retreats into herself and gradually stops eating; her dad becomes increasingly violent and distant from his wife; her sister Hanna acts out; her brother Obbe grows to torture animals. But the most afflicted by Matthies’ death is Jas. 
 
This is where the novel shines. Jas, convinced she is to blame for her brother’s death, dons a red coat and for the rest of the novel, refuses to take it off. Rijneveld never explicitly states why she does so but that is intentional. Her coat shields her from thoughts of her brother’s death (however futile it may be) and like how she is swallowed up by the increasingly dirty jacket, she is soon trapped in her own thoughts, obsessed with a search for an answer that was never there to begin with. 
 
“ ‘One day I’d like to go to myself,’ I say quietly, pushing the pin into the soft flesh of my navel. I bite my lip so as not to make a sound, and a trickle of blood runs down to the elastic of my pants and soaks into the fabric.” 
 
Jas’ despair manifests in her heightened desire to leave her community with Hanna, her souring friendship with Belle, and her weird childlike fixation on Jews hiding in her basement from Nazis. In Rijenveld’s novel, however, trauma is more complex, more ambiguous, and perhaps more unusually focused on the disquieting symptoms of grief. There are some genuinely subversive and sexual scenes in the novel, made only more unsettling when you remember Jas is ten years old.
In two separate incestuous incidents, Jas, Obbe, and Hanna explore their bodies together and Obbe’s cruelty towards animals translates into violence against his sisters. In another, Jas watches Obbe insert an artificial insemination kit for cows into Belle, captured in detail through Rijneveld’s writing.
 

However, the explorations of sexuality and violence are not necessarily gratuitous — the scenes serve as Rijneveld’s comment that grief can be repulsive, something that simply cannot be categorised as sadness or anguish. Nevertheless, Rijneveld also depicts the more conventional nature of grief.
By the end of Act 2, the family’s cows are slated to be slaughtered due to the foot-and-mouth disease, and Jas’ father and Obbe display more emotion here than at the loss of Matthies. Her father’s bottled emotions spill over, leading to an outburst where he protests the killings with bible verses.
 
However, the pacing of the first two acts was undermined by the novel’s final act, which lulled in places and writhed slowly towards the ending. After the “climax” of the slaughtered cows, there wasn’t anything particularly notable in Act 3. Trauma that had already been well established was examined again and near the last twenty pages, I was left wondering how Rijneveld would conclude the novel.
Jas’s suicide is a very tragic but natural way to end the novel, but the scene where she decided to do so felt so rushed and ruined what could have been a dreadful scene to behold. That may be the point — that there isn’t a specific breaking point for Jas — but the way it was written left me with a sense of “Oh, that’s it?” instead of a looming fear of her death.


The third act thus felt, at best, unnecessary, or at worst, contrived to the point that it tarnished the well-crafted exploration of intergenerational religious trauma. 
 
This isn’t to say I regretted reading The Discomfort of Evening. I just wish the ending struck as much of a chord in me as the first 100 pages did. Months after reading this novel, I still have conflicting feelings towards the novel. Grief is rarely so simple, but perhaps it’s best captured in Rijneveld’s own words: 
 
“Lots of people want to run away, but the ones who really do rarely announce it beforehand: they just go." 
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