Dave Schaafsma's Reviews > The Discomfort of Evening

“I know, though, that we'd have to come from a better family to be able to bury our childhood - we'd have to lie under a layer of earth ourselves, but the time isn't ripe for that yet.”

How can I write about this book? The Discomfort of Evening by Dutch author Marieke Lucas Rijneveld was awarded the International Man Booker Prize for 2020 and I see many very bright and thoughtful people here could either not finish the book or ended up so disturbed by it that they one-starred it. Being Dutch-American, I’d been feeling I should read more Dutch books, and here was one that was supposedly good. And I agreed, but not without putting it down a few times and despite a nightmare or two. But that was the author’s intent, to capture the horrors of trauma. Hey, a book for our times. So this won’t exactly be a review, but I’ll say I, too, was deeply disturbed by the book even as I was completely taken in by the ten-year-old girl narrator. There’s much lyrical writing and many starkly painful descriptions of death, sexual acts, animal cruelty.

What’s it about? The story is told by Jas, who loses her brother after she prays for him to die rather than her rabbit. And then the whole family, living on a dairy farm, steeped in the Dutch Reformed Church, falls apart in grief and madness--Mom stops eating and openly admits she wants to die; Dad shuts down and goes into his own madness even as he also loses his cattle to disease, and the three remaining kids are left to fend for themselves, rudderless. The spectre of a noose is present throughout.

There’s a lot of disturbing vulnerable or vicious coming-of-age books--I’ve read Foster and The Ice Palace recently; there’s Lord of the Flies--that defy the often commonplace understanding that youth is about innocence and adulthood about corruption. That’s part of this book, for sure, that the horrors of the world can shape you--break you--even at the earliest ages. The children in Lydia Millet’s The Children’s Bible--for the most part good kids-- are left to raise themselves. The kids in Rinjeveld’s book are mostly not handling things well, but why do they have to be? They’re in trauma, and they’re kids.

But it’s something else, too. I’m Dutch-American, as I said. My grandparents on both my mother’s and father’s sides--Schaafsmas and Kuypers--came over to the US in the late nineteenth century; both families lived in the Groningen area. The Schaafsmas were sheep farmers for generations. My mother’s family, coopers, barrel-makers, cask-makers-- had in its lineage the Dutch theologian and politician Abraham Kuyper, aligned with John Calvin. Both of my parents' families settled in Dutch western Michigan--the Holland and Grand Rapids area. They spoke Dutch and never taught us; they also spoke Frisian with each other at times.

I knew (a little, maybe wrongly) that a lot of Dutch families came to the US because of religious oppression. Many were extremists. The Reformed Church featured in this book is one with which I am familiar, though the dark madness Rijneveld depicts I never personally knew. My family is/was largely sane and loving. But I knew of the Protestant Reformed Church, where kids dressed in clothes without bright colors, no tv or radio, no Sunday work or play; my family's version is called the Christian Reformed Church--I also couldn’t play outside and we couldn’t watch TV on Sunday, either--my parents went to church three days on Sunday, one service all in Dutch; I was required to go twice on Sunday. I was forced by my family and church to make public Profession of Faith and the elders urged me to renounce all worldly pursuits, including the watching of films and contemporary music and dancing. I refused. But my religion banned dancing; we did, anyway; we could these events "foot functions."

I really do not know if this is true but we had heard, growing up, that there were more churches per square mile in the Zeeland area of Michigan, near Holland, than any other place in the country, but also more venereal disease and teenage pregnancy. Repression. I and my friends snorted with dark laughter when we heard this in the early seventies.

The Dutch Reformed Church shapes much of the horror of this book. It provides the basic grim background, and is foregrounded many times when Dad quotes from The Bible--"The Authorized Version." It begins with the death of a brother but the religious extremism provides no comfort, only further horror. Is it fair to Dutch Christians? Everything the mad Dad quotes from the Bible to threaten his children I know. But this Dad is crazed in a way I have never met.

“I’ve discovered that there are two ways of losing your belief: some people lose God when they find themselves; some people lose God when they lose themselves.”

In my church as I grew up--steeped in a Calvinist first principle of Original Sin as a way of understanding all the bad in the world--I heard much more about sin than love, much more about Hell than Heaven. My church was one of the most conservative in western Michigan, though my family was happy, not brutal or cruel. In this book the parents are just lost, and thus the kids are.

Jas has deft and lyrical observations, but she is spinning in her grief and her own madness:

“I nod and think about the teacher who said I’d go far with my empathy and boundless imagination, but in time I’d have to find words for it because otherwise everything and everybody stays inside you. And one day, just like the black stockings which my classmates sometimes tease me about wearing because we’re Reformists – even though I never wear black stockings – I will crumple in on myself until I can only see darkness, eternal darkness.”

“I don’t want to feel any sadness, I want action; something to pierce my days, like bursting a blister with a pin so that the pressure is eased.”

“Later I sometimes thought that this was when the emptiness began. . .”

At one point Jas decides to never take off her coat:

“Nobody knows my heart. It's hidden deep inside my coat, my skin, my ribs. My heart was important for nine months inside my mother's belly, but once I left the belly, everyone stopped caring whether it beat enough times per hour. No one worries when it stops or begins to beat fast, telling me there must be something wrong.”

I left the Dutch Reformed Church that I saw in my experience--though I had friends who had much better and more uplifting and loving experiences--was dark and repressive and joyless. I think that this is a book about loss, grief, madness, framed by the darkness of a religion that provides no relief, no succor, no healing balm, no joy. What happens in the book as the family descends into madness is very disturbing though also is filled with amazing observations and lyrical language, too. It’s horrible and heart-breaking and at the same time kind of amazingly depicted at times. I am quite sure it is too graphic for many people and I understand that and warn you.

“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.”