20-9-2020

Il disagio della sera

The Discomfort of Evening

de Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

22 Mar 2020 

The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld – review

A remarkable debut novel about a Dutch farm girl and her strict Christian family is unflinching and disturbing

Holly Williams

Discomfort is putting it mildly. Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s debut novel, which has been longlisted for the International Booker prize, goes all the way to disturbing. A bestseller in the 28-year-old’s native Netherlands, the book begins with a 10-year-old girl, Jas, feeling angry at not being allowed to go ice-skating with her brother Matthies and wishing he would die instead of her rabbit (she fears her unsentimental dairy-farming father has his eye on the pet for dinner).

And then her brother does die, falling through the ice.

What follows is an unflinching study of a family falling apart in the madness of grief, rendered all the more unnerving for the childishly plain, undramatic way their compulsive behaviours are reported. They are further tested by the arrival of foot-and-mouth disease on the farm (the book is set around the 2001 outbreak), necessitating the slaughter of their beloved cows.

Jas’s family are strict Christians – a background shared with Rijneveld, who still works on a dairy farm. The non-binary author has talked about growing up with a sense of a “threatening, cruel God” – and also losing a brother at a young age, which the family barely discussed. Suffering in silence is the fictionalised family’s response too. “We only knew about the harvest that came from the land, not about the things that grew inside ourselves,” Jas says.

Even before Matthies’s death, the parents are pious to the point of punitive; bodily functions are a source of shame. Afterwards, it’s as if teachings about sin, penance and the corporeal become painfully snarled up with the family’s loss, and their desperate attempts to control or master it.

Jas refuses to take off her increasingly disgusting red coat, keeps a drawing pin stuck in her belly button and develops chronic constipation (this matter-of-fact scatological novel is not for the squeamish). 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.

Throughout The Discomfort of Evening 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”. There’s a particularly unpleasant scene featuring a metal artificial insemination gun going into a hole it was never intended for.

Rijneveld really doesn’t hold back with all this, poking sticky fingers into nasty places to stir up uneasy memories of prepubescent explorations of sexuality and mortality. The novel evokes a general curiosity and bewilderment with the adult world, here given two supercharged shots in the backside by the unspeakable (in all sense) tragedy of the brother’s death and the pressure of extreme religious beliefs.

Translated by Michele Hutchison, Rijneveld’s writing is raw and impassive, though often grotesquely vivid in its descriptions. Skinned knuckles look like “ruptured prawns’ heads”; bits of wet crisp at the swimming pool “stick to your feet like blisters”. Jas has a singular imagination, too: she pictures her dead granny’s face “beginning to ooze eggnog as thin as yolk” out of eye sockets and pores.

Not everything works: Rijneveld seems to strain in search of an ending. Jas’s conviction that her mum is hiding Jews in the basement seems less plausible than most of her delusions and rather underdeveloped. (Apparently, the Dutch version also contained a joke deemed too offensive for British publication – removing it seems a strange choice, serving only to inflame an imagination already given a good stoking by Rijneveld.)

But this is a pretty remarkable debut. Confident in its brutality, yet contained rather than gratuitous, it introduces readers to both a memorably off-key narrator and a notable new talent.

• The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld (translated by Michele Hutchison) is published by Faber .

             IL LIBRAIO.it

https://www.iLllibraio.it/news/dautore/disagio-sera-marieke-lucas-rijnevelds-esordio-1239640/

“Il disagio della sera” di Marieke Lucas Rijnevelds è l’esordio di una scrittura straordinaria e dolorosa

 di Martina Scalini 12.11.2019

“Il disagio della sera” di Marieke Lucas Rijnevelds è un romanzo di esordio sorprendente, non solo per lo stile puntuale e ricco di immagini – che difficilmente ti abbandonano – , ma soprattutto per l’oppressione e la morsa che, pagina dopo pagina, stringe i personaggi del libro al lettore, facendolo immergere completamente nel cupo mondo di una bambina di dieci anni che affronta la morte del fratello in una famiglia spezzata dal lutto – L’approfondimento

Come può una bambina di dieci anni, cresciuta in una fattoria con una famiglia fortemente religiosa e rigida, affrontare la morte di un fratello? Chiudendosi nel suo cappotto e decidendo di non toglierselo più. Così Jas prova a far fronte a un evento più grande di lei.

Mancano appena due giorni a Natale e Matthies, fratello maggiore di quattro figli, esce per andare a pattinare sul ghiaccio. Da quella gita, però, non farà più ritorno, precipitando l’intera famiglia nell’abisso di un’assenza continuamente reiterata, dal cappotto appeso che non verrà mai più indossato, al posto al tavolo della cucina che non verrà mai più occupato e a una madre che lentamente si consumerà, rifiutando, insieme al cibo, la continuazione della vita, per lei e per tutti.

“Il mio cuore non lo conosce nessuno, è ben nascosto sotto al giaccone, alla pelle e alle costole. Dentro la pancia della mamma è stato importante per nove mesi, ma da quando sono uscita nessuno si preoccupa più di sapere se fa abbastanza battiti all’ora, nessuno si spaventa quando si ferma per un attimo o comincia a martellare così forte che deve essere per la paura o per la tensione”.

Jas, il nome della protagonista, in olandese significa proprio giaccone. Non se lo toglie anche quando inizia a perdere colore, ci dorme dentro come se fosse una seconda pelle che la protegge dal gelo di una famiglia spezzata. È convinta che se lo slacciasse rischierebbe di ammalarsi e dare un altro dispiacere ai genitori. Più il cappotto è aderente al suo corpo e più la realtà smette di far presa, trasformando la normale curiosità di una quasi adolescente, in un’esplorazione surreale del mondo che la porta a credersi cattiva come Hitler perché nato il suo stesso giorno, o a compiere orribili esperimenti con il corpo degli animali e strane esperienze sessuali con i fratelli Hanna e Obbe.

Il giaccone rosso diventa per lei lo stigma di una colpa che prova verso la morte del fratello. Jas infatti si convince di averlo sacrificato, nelle preghiere a Dio, per risparmiare il suo amato coniglio Dieuwertje dall’essere servito come pranzo il giorno di Natale.

“Noi non viviamo mai nella stagione presente, pensiamo sempre alla successiva. Ci rinnoviamo in continuazione, solo i nostri genitori hanno smesso di rinnovarsi. Non fanno che ripetere parole, comportamenti, schemi e riti come se fossero l’Antico Testamento”.

Jas trattiene tutto, tanto da diventare stitica, e in qualche modo si assume la responsabilità della felicità dei genitori che, chiusi in un irreparabile dolore, abitano da sempre una vita di sacrifici e doveri che la morte improvvisa del figlio confonde, interrompendone il ritmo. Da suo padre Jas riceve poco affetto e misurate attenzioni che le sembrano inferiori rispetto a quelle che riserva alle mucche della fattoria. La madre invece, le cui preghiere solo l’unico rifugio, è il ritratto di un appassire inesorabile che non sa come assumere se non di nuovo con la colpa, introiettata forse dalle lunghe domeniche in chiesa.

“A volte ho paura che sia colpa nostra, che la stiamo mangiucchiando da dentro come fanno i figli del tessitore di filo nero. Nell’ora di scienze la maestra ha spiegato che dopo la schiusa delle uova la mamma ragno si offre alla nidiata”.

Jas aspetta il suo personale salvatore per scappare da quella “vita autentica”. A metà tra la figura christi e l’uomo romantico, insieme alla sorella Hannah fantastica sul suo arrivo, anche se un giorno dichiara a se stessa di essere lei il luogo dove andare, un posto nuovo da conoscere. Scelta che consacra forando il suo ombelico con una puntina, proprio come la maestra a scuola fa con uno spillo sulla mappa del mondo per indicare il Canada.

Il disagio della sera (Nutrimenti, traduzione di Stefano Musilli) di Marieke Lucas Rijnevelds è diviso in tre parti che si concludono tutte con un evento doloroso. La prima parte è scritta al passato e ci porta lentamente nel mondo di Jas al momento della morte del fratello, mentre le altre due, al presente, descrivono la difficile elaborazione del lutto della famiglia, fino a sfociare in un finale sconvolgente.

Il romanzo d’esordio di Rijnevelds (nella foto di Ouk Oosterhof, ndr) è qualcosa di sorprendente, non solo per lo stile puntuale e ricco di immagini – che difficilmente ti abbandonano anche molti giorni dopo –, ma soprattutto per l’oppressione e la morsa che, pagina dopo pagina, stringono i personaggi al lettore, facendolo immergere completamente nella sua cupa atmosfera. Colpisce che una persona così giovane possa saperne così tanto sulla morte, sul dolore che si prova nell’affrontarla e sulle strade tortuose che si possono intraprendere cercando una spiegazione.

La motivazione risiede nell’infanzia di Rijnevelds che, in un’intervista per Volkskrant, racconta il suo background in parte simile a quello di Jas, con cui ha in comune non solo la morte prematura di un fratello maggiore, ma anche la vita nella campagna olandese in una famiglia riformista cattolica. E, come la protagonista del libro, ricorda i suoi genitori piegati dalla perdita per il figlio, portando a galla un ricordo di forte impatto, che fa eco alle molte immagini presenti nel libro: “Ho asciugato le lacrime dalle guance delle persone grandi con la zampa del mio orsacchiotto”.

·         April 24, 2020

A Dark Debut Propels a Dutch Writer to Reluctant Fame

Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s novel “The Discomfort of Evening” was a best seller in the Netherlands. Now, it’s been nominated for the Booker International Prize.

By Douglas Greenwood

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Marieke Lucas Rijneveld is an author who confides in their reader, rather than family or friends. “I am a private person,” the writer, who identifies as male and uses the pronouns they and them, said on a recent video call from their home in Utrecht, the Netherlands.

“I wake up early every day and, after breakfast, immediately start writing,” Rijneveld said. Their fears and desires, they added, all get channeled into their work: “I don’t tell a lot of people around me about my secrets.”

Rijneveld’s novel “The Discomfort of Evening” became a best seller in the Netherlands when it was published there in 2018, and, unusually for a work of Dutch literature, it is also enjoying success abroad. The book has already been published in English in Britain, and will be released in the United States in September. German, French, Italian, Spanish, Arabic and Korean translations are also available, or in the works.

Last month, “The Discomfort of Evening” became the first Dutch novel to be shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. Six books were announced as in the running for the annual translated literature award, with the winner to be revealed in May. But, in a statement on April 20, the prize’s British organizers postponed the prize-giving until an unspecified date in the summer, “to ensure that readers are able to get hold of copies of the shortlisted books.” (Book stores, like many businesses in Britain, are closed because of the coronavirus pandemic.)

Rijneveld, 29, has published two anthologies of poetry, but “The Discomfort of Evening” is their debut novel. Set on a dairy farm in the Netherlands in the early 2000s, it tells the story of Jas, a 10-year-old girl who grapples with grief and a loss of religious faith after her older brother dies in an ice skating accident. Jas watches as her brother’s death sends the family into a spiral: Her father grows emotionally distant; her mother experiences an episode of psychosis; and her siblings, whose sexual desires are awakening with puberty, begin exploring each other’s bodies and abusing animals on the farm.

Michele Hutchison, who translated the novel from Dutch to English, said in a telephone interview that she found it hard working on the book’s “more gruesome” passages. “When you translate, the words come out of your fingers like you’re living them,” she said. Some scenes involving incest were particularly difficult, she added: “I’d tend not to do those passages at the end of the day, in case I would get nightmares.”

Rijneveld was raised in a strict Protestant household in Nieuwendijk, a village about 50 miles south of Amsterdam. Like the characters in “The Discomfort of Evening,” Rijneveld’s parents were dairy farmers; the author was 3 when their 12-year-old brother was struck and killed by a bus on his way to school.

“When somebody dies in a family, you see one of two things happen,” Rijneveld said. “Either the family grows closer or it falls apart. As a child, I could see that ours was starting to fall apart.”

Some of the parallels between the book and their brother’s death caused a rift in Rijneveld’s family, they said. When the novel was published in the Netherlands, “the entire village talked about it,” Rijneveld added. “My family and I are very different. They didn’t grow up with stories or literature, so it’s difficult for them to understand that, in a book like my novel, not everything needs to be true.”

Rijneveld’s mother has read the book, they said, but their father hasn’t. “I gave my parents words for their grief that they might not have chosen themselves,” the writer said. (Lize Spit, a Belgian writer who is friends with Rijneveld, said Rijneveld was no longer in contact with their family.)

Rijneveld said that since they were a child, their gender was always ambiguous. They preferred wearing boy’s clothes, they said, and, on the first day of high school, when they were still known as “Marieke,” a classmate asked if they were a boy or a girl. “I didn’t know,” Rijneveld said. “I hadn’t thought about it.”

They were bullied, they said, for looking like a tomboy, and so dressed “more and more like a girl” to fit in. At 19, Rijneveld left school and the family home to study teaching at college in Utrecht.

There, they discovered the work of the Dutch writer and artist Jan Wolkers. Wolkers’s writing is known in the Netherlands for its frank emotions and explicit sex scenes, which led to mixed reviews in Dutch media in the 1960s. Rijneveld said they were struck by the similarities between Wolkers’s life and their own: They both grew up in the Reformed Church, loved animals and had brothers who died. “I knew I wanted to write like him,” Rijneveld said.

At 23, they changed their name from Marieke to “Marieke Lucas,” adding the name of a childhood imaginary friend. “I asked myself if I wanted to be a boy, a girl, or something in between,” they said. “I

decided I wanted to be in between.”

A year later, in 2015, shortly after Rijneveld’s 24th birthday, the Dutch publisher Atlas Contact released Rijneveld’s first collection of poetry, “Kalfsvlies,” published in English as “Calf’s Caul.”

Sarah Timmer Harvey, who translated the poems, said in an email exchange that Rijneveld’s voice was “naïve, and full of unexpected wisdom,” adding that the world they created was “unlike anything I’ve encountered in Dutch literature.”

Many of the themes in Rijneveld’s poetry, like religion and childhood trauma, are explored further in “The Discomfort of Evening.” Simon(e) Van Saarloos, a Dutch writer and commentator on L.G.B.T. issues, said that the book had been so successful in the Netherlands because it gave new perspectives on themes explored regularly in Dutch literature by older, gender-conforming writers. “It speaks to a traditional storytelling of the Netherlands within a small village: the repressive experience of religion and how that represses sexual expression,” she said in a telephone interview.

Rijneveld said that, as a child, religion had given structure and meaning to their life, but, as they got older, it became less important. “I grew up with God, and you’re taught as a child to tell God everything that’s on your mind that you’re struggling with,” they said. “I’m trying to do the same thing by writing that I did as a child by praying: hoping, desiring and asking for some relief.”

Since the Netherlands went into lockdown in March, life has changed for Rijneveld: Scheduled book tours have been put on hold; their afternoon ritual of feeding the cows at a farm on the outskirts of Utrecht has stopped. “Now I know much more what loneliness can be like, and that it’s important to invest in human contact,” Rijneveld said.

“A lot of writers struggle with that,” they added. “I’m certainly one of them.”

An Award-Winning Debut Novel About Innocence Shattered Offers Terror and Solace

By Parul Sehgal

·         Sept. 8, 2020

·         Two weeks ago, the International Booker Prize was awarded to a best-selling, already notorious portrait of childhood, “The Discomfort of Evening,” written by the Dutch novelist Marieke Lucas Rijneveld and translated by Michele Hutchison. At 29, Rijneveld (who uses they/them pronouns) is the youngest-ever recipient of the prize. “I am proud as a cow with seven udders,” they responded to the official announcement.

·         This is Rijneveld in short: an earthy and irreverent new voice, thrillingly uninhibited in style and subject matter. “The Discomfort of Evening” is set among dairy farmers who are members of a strict Protestant sect, much like the writer’s own family. Rijneveld still works on a farm. The novel teems — I say this admiringly — with all the filth of life.

·         The title refers to the point in the evening when cows begin to low and call for relief, their udders heavy with milk. The story is about painful repletion of another kind, and of solace that never arrives.

·         The Mulder family has come apart after the death of the oldest child, a son, in an ice-skating accident. Jas, the 10-year-old narrator, refuses to take off her red coat; it hangs on her, increasingly foul-smelling and heavy, pockets drooping with toads, rabbit whiskers and other mementos for the protective rituals she and her two remaining siblings have taken to performing. Her brother torments animals as sacrifices. Her sister dreams of fleeing the farm. Their parents scarcely look at each other, scarcely touch. Jas — who has grown up in a home with a lavish vocabulary for animals, but obsessional silence where human life is concerned — assesses her parents pragmatically: “This must mean they don’t mate either.”

·         Enter those toads. Jas believes that her resentment of her brother caused his death. Now she is convinced that if she can force her bucket of toads to mate, her parents might follow suit. Health and happiness would be restored. It is one of her milder schemes. There’s also the involved subplot that deals with Jas’s persistent constipation; she makes herself ill to give her parents a topic of conversation.

·         The story draws partly from life. Rijneveld also grew up with the notion of a “threatening, cruel God” in a family annihilated by the death of a son in childhood. Rijneveld says their parents are still “too frightened” to read the novel.

·         This strikes me as eminently sensible. I was wary myself. I’d heard about scenes of animal torture, and of sadistic sexual exploration between the siblings. In an interview, Hutchison spoke of the difficulty of translating some parts, particularly those involving incest: “I’d tend not to do those passages at the end of the day, in case I would get nightmares.”

·         The novel didn’t give me nightmares only because sleep became a faint possibility. Rijneveld will play to all your phobias and nurture new ones. Even now, my blood jumps to remember certain images. The pull-tab from a can of Coke. That scene in which Jas and her brother entice a neighborhood girl into the farm’s “sperm barn,” where seed is harvested from the bulls. It’s a matter of a few short paragraphs, but how Patrick Bateman would twist with envy.

·         There is the matter of the toads. I would like to extend a personal apology to all toads.

·         It’s not the violence that feels so shocking — it’s the innocence. The violence in the book is visited on small bodies, mute bodies, by those who are themselves small, young, lacking in language. Jas’s narration might be rich with metaphors — but almost all of them are bovine. She finds corollaries only in the world of the cows; she cannot tether herself to anything human. As the Mulder parents retreat into grief, their children are left alone to invent their own rules, their own cosmology. They cross ordinary borders of decency in wild confusion. The blurring of victim and perpetrator is complex, complete, difficult to bear.

·         However strong your readerly constitution, it might feel like a peculiar time to pick up a book so mournful and gory. And yet, I went to it every day without dread, with, in fact, a gratitude that surprised me. It was the gratitude of not being condescended to. Novels disappoint not only by being clumsily written or conceived but by presenting a version of the world that is simpler and more sanitized than we know it to be. Fiction about childhood is especially prone, with a few notable exceptions (the work of Jean Stafford, for example). The spaciousness of Rijneveld’s imagination comes as terror and solace. That lack of squeamishness, that frightening extremity, which, in Hutchison’s clean, calm translation, never feels showy or manipulative, gives full voice to the enormity of the children’s grief, their obscene deprivation.

·         As with any novel so interested in complicity and repression, there’s a temptation to read “The Discomfort of Evening” as a parable. I was frequently reminded of Michael Haneke’s film “The White Ribbon,” about the savage, secretive rituals of a group of children in a German village before World War I. It’s another excoriation of a punitive Protestantism and familial cycles of violence, which Haneke holds responsible for creating a society vulnerable to fascist ideology. The cowed children of the film enact their humiliations on one another. They will grow up, we understand, to become Nazis. “The Discomfort of Evening” is not nearly so explicit. Jas is studying the Holocaust at school. Her questions and preoccupations gesture at the links between the individual and the collective’s capacity for denial and willed amnesia.

·         But these are intimations only, embers. We return always to Jas, in her smelly, decidedly non-allegorical coat, filled with toads. We return to her story that feels like a dare — can we face it when even her parents have turned away? Will we succumb to discomfort or will we find in that discomfort a harsh and surprising lesson — the writer’s credo? “Discomfort is pure because it’s when we’re vulnerable,” Rijneveld has said. “It’s when we’re being ourselves instead of pretending to be who we want to be.”

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