Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience.

In this grim, claustrophobic novel, Marieke Lucas Rijneveld masterfully creates an impending feeling of doom - on this Dutch farm, the apocalypse is nearing. Our narrator and main character is 10-year-old Jas who grows up in a strict religious family who owns a dairy farm. When she detects signs that her father might kill her favorite rabbit, she begs God to take her older brother instead. When he brother then drowns and her parents are lost n their grief, the children are left to their own devices to survive.
A shocking and unflinching novel

I found this book painful to read and just another ','coming of age ' and 'literary abuse '
story.
I cant.really find anything I liked about it but bravo to the author for having be go

I found the unremitting misery of this book to be unendurable in these difficult times so I skipped to the end and was glad I did.

"According to the pastor, discomfort is good. In discomfort we are real."

This quote sums up the whole book - but not in a good way.

The Discomfort of Evening is the classic Misery Porn that is so common in literary fiction. (Personally I think "literary fiction" is just genre fiction wearing a monocle and smoking a cigar, but lets not talk about why I think the whole term is stupid right now.)

It was the epitome of "literary fiction" in basically every single way - the Hemingway-esque prose (i.e. not poetic or purple; minimalist), a series of increasingly terrible events, burgeoning childhood/adolescent sexual awakenings tainted by said terrible events, and of course you mustn't forget to point out how hypocritical religion is.

Unfortunately, I've become accustomed to literary fiction being depressing to the point of farce, so I wasn't particularly surprised. The literary consensus seems to be that happy endings are for genre fiction, especially romance, and literary fiction is all about being Serious with Gritty Realism that always manifests as awful things happening because life is pain and full of misery, apparently. I don't want to stop reading literary fiction, because some can do depressing books well (The Secret History, Lolita), and some don't have a wholly depressing ending at all The Great Gatsby, Cloud Atlas.

The Discomfort of Evening is a novel about a deep, roling depression that takes over the family after the death of the eldest son. You would think, then, that we got a lot of emotional insights - but we didn't. The author took "show, not tell" to its extreme, so we hardly ever know precisely what Jas is feeling, which in turn creates a disconnect between the reader and the main character. It was just all a bit flat, and pointless. An entirely pointless book with incredibly mediocre writing; although this might be a translation issue, I doubt it.

And this won the International Booker Prize. My God. When are Serious Literature people going to stop going crazy over wanky stuff like this which is basically just, "I'm a child on the cusp of being a teenager and a tragedy has happened but my parents refuse to talk about it so everything is awful I guess. Oh and BTW, religion is bad."

It's like the author was like, "Oh damn, I just realised my book is a load of pointless wank, I'd better shoehorn some social commentary into it! Uhhhh religious people are hypocritical. Yup, that should do it."

I have no idea how I read this whole thing without skimming, actually. Surely I deserve some sort of medal.

OK, so this book is extraordinary. Phenomenal, in fact. Unique and powerful. It is also, though, deeply disturbing. Do not come to this book expecting a warm, cosy read, The Discomfort of Evening scars. And scars deep.

We are with Jas, a traumatised 10-year-old Dutch farm girl who has just lost her older brother in an ice-skating accident and whose parents are now destroyed by their grief. Bereft of a supportive family unit, Jas instead stumbles through her burgeoning adolescence, unsure how to navigate her emerging sexuality and process her sadness.

Jas, though, is surrounded by trauma. Her family is devout to the point of cult-ish with their Christianity and her father is abusive and cruel (a section where he forces solid soap up Jas’s bottom to free chronic constipation indicative of the almost violent incursions into Jas’s emotional and physical privacy).

All of this Marieke Lucas Rijneveld describes in vivid, unrelenting prose. Yet Jas is drawn with such empathy – a confused young girl desperately misreading all the body language and signs around her. It is heart-breaking stuff but so unique and so brilliant is the writing that it is evident how Marieke won the Man Booker International with this, her debut novel. Remarkable.

There was much to enjoy here, but I found I couldn't connect with it. I'd read more from this author in the future though.

I received an advanced reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to NetGalley, Faber & Faber, and the author Marieke Lucas Rijneveld.
'Discomfort' sums this book up pretty perfectly. It was incredibly descriptive, visceral even, and incredibly uncomfortable and unsettling. The author painted a vivid picture, but the topics covered, the grief and trauma in the pages made it difficult to read.
I can completely appreciate the skill of the author, but it was just too bleak and unsettling for me. 3 stars (5 for the prose, 2 for the lack of pleasure in reading it).

My thanks to Faber & Faber for a digital copy via NetGalley of ‘The Discomfort of Evening’ by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld in exchange for an honest review. It was translated from the Dutch by Michele Hutchison and published as an ebook in March 2020 with its paperback edition following in September. My apologies for the late feedback.

I do like to read titles shortlisted for The Booker Prize including the International Prize in order to expand my appreciation of literary fiction.

As for the plot, it is semi-autobiographical reflecting aspects of Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s strict Christian upbringing on a diary farm in The Netherlands. The narrator is ten-year-old Jas.

Jas is upset when she realises that her father is feeding up her rabbit for Christmas dinner: “I asked God if he please couldn't take my brother Matthies instead of my rabbit. 'Amen.'” The tragic accident that follows leaves the family devastated and Jas enveloped in guilt. Jas’ response is to refuse to take off her red coat. The coat becomes deeply symbolic and very smelly.

Without doubt, I found this novel challenging. The descriptions were certainly vivid though its scatological themes, prepubescent explorations of body bits, bullying, and animal cruelty went beyond disturbing to repulsive. Yet I had been pre-warned by several media reviews though it exceeded what I had imagined. While undoubtedly a powerful exploration of grief, I felt that its sensational and graphic aspects dominated the narrative.

Knowing that this novel was inspired by Rijneveld’s upbringing makes me even more grateful for my own quiet and relatively happy childhood. It does seem to me that a number of literary novels in recent years have been the fictional equivalent of misery memoirs and I count this novel among them. Did writing such a raw, graphic account serve as a form of therapy for them?

Still, even if disturbing in parts, ‘The Discomfort of Evening’ has become a bestseller and won awards, including the International Booker Prize, so it clearly appealed to the judges, even if not to me.

I’m sorry but I couldn’t continue this book to the second part. It just never gripped me and seemed too obscure in language. It wasn’t the simple book I had hoped for.

I began to have my doubts about this book at about 10% in.
I toiled on but it got worse and at 68% I decided I wouldn’t subject myself to it any longer.
I understand that grief is a current literary trend but here it felt like the author was using it as excuse to present shocking scenarios.

The narrative centres on a poor, religious farming family grieving the loss of the oldest son. The parents’ grief is expressed through a withdrawal from family life and emotional neglect of the remaining children who gradually turn feral, indulging in self-abuse, incest and negligent cruelty to animals.
The author appears to be obsessed with the functions and secretions of both human and animal bodies and the investigation of such features prominently in every other scene. Some of the hygiene issues turned my stomach.

It all seemed self-indulgent and juvenile with no real attempt to explore the less superficial effects of loss. The fact that it is narrated by a young teen girl just makes it more disturbing.

A harrowing and deeply disturbing novel, The Disconfort of Evening immerses the reader in the narrator's world, and the aftermath of her brother's death, which leads to destructive consequences for the rest of the family.
I thoroughly enjoyed it, and it's "what the hell!" moments.

An audacious novel blurring transgressive fiction and a young writer's cathartic reckoning with a family who refused to talk about emotions.

The early chapters were packed with dark absurd comedy, and a disgustingness that combines the silliness of small children shouting "poobum!" as a pretend expletive, with the imaginative skill of the best British creative swearing. Though it does depend how you react to daftness like "When the teacher was telling us about it, I wondered what it would be like to kiss a tash-face like Hitler." (Translating humour so it's actually funny in another language requires a lot of skill and this is such a great choice of words by Michele Hutchison. I don't think I'd ever heard "tash-face" before - despite being a kid in the 80s when moustaches were quite common and increasingly unfashionable - but it sounds like real slang, and has a sharp sound that makes it essentially funny.) I'd heard only about how dark and disturbing The Discomfort of Evening was, and it was a total surprise to find myself laughing at it more than at any other novel I’d read for over a year. The humour, however, peters out. Not immediately after the death of protagonist Jas's older brother - the catalyst for the events of the novel - but not long after. Occasional absurdities continue throughout the book, but never anywhere near the rate at which they began.

Somewhere between a third and half way through the book, I started to get bored. My notes became dominated by repetitive observations that such and such the mother or father did or said was bad parenting, or that something Jas or one of her two siblings did was a bad sign - or just the words "oh dear". Just for some change in the monotony, I wanted to see how these people would react to family therapy (though they were obviously unlikely to try it). But if the reader is bored, that's also the writing being effective: it emphasises how monotonous experiences like this are to live for years on end- this is why Jas constantly dreams of escaping to "the other side" (of a local bridge, to the outside, less stultifying world).

Accumulated, the various incidents of mistreatment of animals, and children's dubious sexual explorations started to feel, tonally, just like those in numerous other literary novels and short stories, simply at a higher concentration. In The Discomfort of Evening they are quite frequent, whereas in lots of books there are only a couple of scenes like this (e.g. in The Remainder, from last year's International Booker long/shortlist, Felipe killing the parrot).

However, there was a difference in the recognition of how emotions and events reverberate in such complex ways, and of how incidents that don't arise from what would be analysed as abusive mindsets in adults can have the effects on children of sexual abuse. (The only novel I can think of that has shown the latter with much clarity is Portnoy's Complaint.) it's something that only seems to have started to be understood by many people in the last decade, with increasing attention to children's bodily boundaries being talked about on parenting forums. Before that one had to put the pieces together oneself, if lucky enough to be able to think in those terms as a kid. The 2020 longlist and then shortlist show this contrast, between the sort of individual clearly recognisable as an abuser, Norma's hideously insidious stepfather Pepe in Hurricane Seasaon, and the ambiguity from adult viewpoints of Jas's father trying to treat a child's constipation with soap in The Discomfort of Evening. Jas' intrusive thoughts and acting out - perpetuating an abuse cycle with other kids - in the following weeks and months demonstrate how its effects are also those of abuse. (Hurricane Season is more about the mental effects, whilst the Dutch novel concentrates on how they manifest in physical actions.)


The Discomfort of Evening strikes me as the work of a writer in their twenties processing and creating from childhood experience, and in particular practising 'using their words' (to near-virtuoso heights) after life in a family which was bad at talking and understanding about feelings. As someone who went over a lot of childhood stuff in their late twenties, but with meticulous attention to the reality of what was remembered as events and what felt inwardly, I am simultaneously fascinated to see where the imagination can go if one uses the felt sense as a creative springboard without boundaries - as Rijneveld deliberately and bravely refuses to say where fact ends and fiction begins in this novel - yet I also felt a certain amount of ennui. For years, I was interested in reading and reviewing fiction that involved digging up old experiences. But these days I am more interested in fiction about the wider world and with a larger historical or political context.

This sense of processing experience was most noticeable to me via a shared habit, one I've done a lot in emails to friends. Rijneveld begins a scene, and frequently, after an early utterance or development, there is a digression into some background or tangentially related family anecdote, which in the case of the novel often goes on for pages. Once the scene in the book's present started again, I often had to look back before the digression to find the last thing that was said in it. I am familiar with a feeling of surfacing after writing something like that of my own for several paragraphs. I had often thought that it's an unsuitable tic for the highest-level writing (like literary fiction from a publisher like Faber), and I'd be interested to know about how the editing was done for this book and how others see this approach.

There are many routine, primarily physical, experiences described here which are fascinating to see described the first few times in life one reads about them, but which become dulled by repetition, e.g. how the kids take apart sandwich cream biscuits to eat them. Through my twenties I noticed the gradual emergence of forum threads and other sites where people talked nostalgically about childhood sweets, and it was a revelation to me to see this mostly private experience (I was an only child who didn't like most of the other kids at my school) put into words. It used to be thrilling to read someone else actually talking about this, as if old neurons were being woken up, like seeing the packaging for some once-favourite food you thought you'd never set eyes on again. These things are now commonplace on the internet in my 40s. The novel makes me wonder if it's inherently always exciting when you are younger, and if it is simply age which makes them duller to talk and read about.

This blend of familiarity and daring transgressive creativity struck me over and over again even whilst I found some of the novel tedious. This weird world of a claustrophobic, provincial family much like the author's own was reminiscent of Alan Bennett (a less-fictionalised, less troubled equivalent; likewise a writer of digressions in which almost everything seems to remind him of an old family anecdote) and Bruno Schulz (on the more obviously fantastical side). And Rijneveld has started out in a very different world from these two, in which media and social media demand to know more about a writer's life, and where truth ends and fiction begins, than ever before. Rijneveld is a master of extraordinary and original metaphors. I tend to judge writers on their metaphors, and for me the numerous examples of these absolutely justify Rijneveld's place on the shortlist
- You can see the blisters on the inside. They’re just like the air cushions in the envelopes Dad sent off vials of bull sperm in, which sometimes stood, lukewarm, among the breakfast things on the table.
- He hasn’t got anything else to do and sits in his smoking chair all day like a stuffed heron, not saying anything until he can turn us into his prey. Herons love moles.
- Look, I don’t know what love is, but I do know it makes you jump high, that it makes you able to swim more lengths, that it makes you visible.

Not for the first time when writing a review, I regret not having read Kathy Acker - as one of the great transgressive writers, and one who had a lot to say about physicality and power in unexpected ways, I wonder if there would be a fruitful comparison and contrast here. Jas' world is confined in many ways - the children are not allowed to go to many places beyond the farm and life is morally constrained by the values of a strict Protestant denomination, meaning that the children often sound and think younger than average kids their age these days - but increasing transgression takes place within these confines, as the children act out doing cruel or merely strange things to animals and one another. What may have only been lurking silently in imagination in the real world, or been bubbling under in the id and found its way to the surface during the writing process, takes place physically in the novel. As appropriately for a novel set on a farm it's very physical and concrete in much of what happens. Having lived next door to a farm, the physical practicality, the sublimation of emotion into physical activity, the scruffiness and flowchart-like chaining of events in the novel feel absolutely integral to and a product of its agricultural setting. It's hard to put into words just how…farmy it is. It seems so obvious that this is one of the ways that a fucked-up family with a farm would be. The novel feels incredibly realistic on a psychic level even in scenes that are most likely fictional or exaggerated. Perhaps farms as a setting, especially pastoral or mixed farms, lend themselves to transgressive weirdness in fiction, because there are more than just humans about and one has to think about bodily functions, mess and death. My benchmark for transgressive/shocking fiction is an extreme 1960s Russian novel, The Sublimes by Yuri Mamleyev - against which I measure every other book I read that's considered shocking. The Discomfort of Evening is less gratuitous, has more evident artistry and humanity - yet there are similarities, many of which seem to stem from the way the farm environment puts human characters in closer contact, mental and physical, with aspects of life that the urban office worker can ignore much of the time and which take up less headspace.

It was surprising - but also a testament to this novel as art - that it isn't more about gender; currently it is made to seem as if any writer with any sort of gender variance is expected to make that the focal point of their work. Yet of course this has not always had to be the case; most of Jan Morris' work has focused on other topics. As someone who would probably be describing themselves as non-binary if twenty-odd today, I thought I could see a more subtle consideration of it; the protagonist has a unisex-sounding name, seems to subtly not feel quite like the girls or the boys, not fitting the system of it in a way that is barely verbalised, and to be trying on sexual roles. (I was reminded of the time at school when I deliberately chose a speech by Olivia from Twelfth Night instead of Viola, as a mixture of trying to demonstrate being in the more acceptable role, and to throw people off the scent, but wouldn't have been able to articulate it that way until several years later).

Right through the novel one can wonder how much was and was not true, but the very end of the book is a writerly coup, a triumph that makes one look differently at all of the rest of it in that respect - and also the ultimate expression of the claustrophobic nature of the household and of how rebellion, especially in teens and twenties, is too often shaped by that which one is reacting against. Yet to analyse it as such seems to take something away from it: instead it seemed to belong framed, like a painting, as the non-verbal culmination to all these words.

I've definitely never read another book like this. It was incredibly visceral, shocking and disturbing, and often quite hard to read for those reasons - reading it was pretty relentlessly gut-punchy. But it really did capture the way grief can rip a family apart, and how it can arrest the happiness and development of children.

This book is such a harrowing read, it took me so long to finish as I think it would be overwhelming to read it all in one go, and I had to stop for little palette cleansers of other books. This isn't for the faint hearted, but despite that, if you can grit your teeth and push through it, it's an intriguing and riveting read. It's like a car crash that you can't quite bring yourself to look away from. Recommended for the morbidly curious.

This is definitely a case of me not being the right reader for the book. I abhor books that deal with cruelty for cruelty sake, I just cannot stand it. Thus, I absolutely hated this book.

I bought this a few weeks ago after reading their intriguing Guardian interview, and since they’ve now been shortlisted for the international booker it’s time to have a read!!

It was such an odd reading experience – engrossing, gripping writing but a subject matter that made me viscerally uncomfortable throughout. I don’t think it would be accurate to say I ‘enjoyed’ it! But I did think it was extremely well-written. What did you think?

This book blew my mind. I have waited to write this review so that I could compose my thoughts but I still feel as overwhelmed as ever.
There is no doubt that The Discomfort of Evening is a painful read. It's gory and unusual but fantastic. The book deals with so many 'taboo' concepts, grief, incest, molestation, animal abuse and yet beneath the difficult topics, is a very simple story - a young girl dealing with her brother's death. The book was hard to read at times but by the end it felt like all of the components were in the right place, a perfect debut novel.

What a peculiar book - a young girl with a strict upbringing faces the death of her older brother and refuses to take off her coat amid sexual experimentation with her siblings.

There isn't a whole lot I can say about the loose plot without giving everything away. It's definitely a study of grief which is very dark in both tone and setting. As you may have guessed in my opening paragraph it also covers some very uncomfortable events. It's interesting to see how these characters ended up doing such things but not everyone will be able to handle it.

The story is told from the perspective of ten year old Jas and it's her perspective on events that makes this story both interesting and mundane! Her naivety is sweet but her she often explains events like your resident nosey neighbour who takes forever to get to the end of any story!

It's beautifully written, definitely shocking but unfortunately it's also a bit of a drag. 🤷‍♂️ For what it's worth, I love the cover art!

I'm torn on this one - how many stars to rate a book which is clearly a stunning and unique work of art but which I really didn't enjoy at all? I've almost never come across this dilemma before. The prose is lyrical and almost palpable in its ability to evoke a sight or a feeling. The setting is majestic; the themes are profound and deftly-handled. But I found myself doing whatever the reading equivalent is of looking squeamishly away from the screen in a cinema far too often for my liking. This is a brutal read - cruelty and misery and suffering and frozen mud are my lasting impressions. The fact that it's brought so vividly alive made it all the less pleasant to immerse myself in. The author has let me witness their world and I don't really know whether to thank them, or ask them politely to leave and never return.
Edit: I meant to mention that as I read on Kindle and therefore hadn't seen the cover, I spent the first 20% of this book assuming the narrator was a boy - it was only when a character insulted Jas by saying she 'couldn't grow tits' that I paused and then started looking for evidence of her being female. It intrigued me.