The Discomfort of Evening: a child’s bargain with God

The morning Matthies goes out

The Dutch publisher, Atlas Contact, describes a Reformed farming family where the parents are so consumed by grief that they scarcely notice what is happening to the children. Jas’s younger sister Hanna and her brother Obbe experience the same loss. We see their reactions through Jas, whose attention to small things often tells us more than her explanations do.

The opening excerpt catches Matthies concentrating on getting only white chocolate spread onto his knife, a pleasure reserved for the holidays. Jas wants to keep everybody indoors and safe. Read together, the kitchen scene and the premise of the prayer let us see how ordinary affection can survive alongside the resentment or fear that prompts a child to wish something terrible.

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The feel of a sentence

In that same excerpt, Jas’s mother rubs the children’s faces with ointment meant for cows’ udders, to protect them from the cold. The pressure of her fingers reminds Jas of the way her mother checks the rind of a cheese. We can feel a gesture meant as care and understand why Jas experiences it as something unsettling. It is a comparison only a child steeped in this work would be likely to make.

In Asymptote, Michele Hutchison describes taking the sentences apart and putting them back together in English. She worked on their rhythm through punctuation and asked what words a ten-year-old in this community would know. In the breakfast scene, counting slices of sausage brings back a school arithmetic problem. The narrator moves freely among things she can name, which is why the images can feel so surprising without sounding learned.

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A road full of toads

The Literary Hub excerpt follows the children on a night when church volunteers are helping toads cross a road. Hanna’s safety vest is hanging open. Jas immediately imagines her sister under the wheels, as though a warning about the animals had already become a picture of what might happen to another person she loves.

Hanna reacts with horror to Obbe’s treatment of small creatures, and Jas puts an arm around her. Jas also imagines the three siblings as the wise men on a journey to find Matthies. The scene can hold a moment of sisterly care alongside an image of violence. It also shows how a story heard in church gives Jas a way to imagine the impossible return of her brother.

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When a private wish feels like a cause

In a joint interview at the London Review Bookshop, Hutchison treats Jas’s bargain as an imaginative act and points out that the Bible still provides much of the children’s language for sacrifice and atonement. It helps to keep those ideas apart. Jas’s conviction gives the death a cause she can picture, and it leaves her responsible for an event she had no power to prevent.

Rijneveld says the book began as something like a prose poem. That is a useful way into the two excerpts: an image can travel from a cow to a child or from a toad to a sister before Jas has put a name to what she is feeling. The result, in these scenes, is a portrait of grief that emerges from the things she sees and touches.

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Who might want to read it

Try the opening if you like fiction whose narrator notices more than she understands, and if you are willing to spend time with what her imagination produces. The breakfast excerpt is a fairer test of the voice than the bare synopsis. The road scene is a better test of your tolerance for animal harm and violent images.

The publishers and the interview also point to disturbing rituals and to sexual material involving children. If you are looking for a gentle novel about mourning or need to steer clear of those subjects, this may be a poor fit. The excerpts show what this voice can do in two scenes; they do not establish how the whole novel handles recovery or what its ending asks of you.

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Three directions to read next

Questions readers ask

Sources and editorial approach

This guide draws on two English excerpts reproduced with Graywolf Press’s permission, publisher and prize records, and interviews with Rijneveld and Hutchison. Reading was limited to the published breakfast and toad-crossing excerpts. The interpretations and comparisons are FolioRoam’s.

1. Faber · The Discomfort of Evening, premise and English translation
2. Atlas Contact · De avond is ongemak, Dutch publisher and family premise
3. Three Percent / University of Rochester · Graywolf-authorized opening excerpt (August 26, 2020)
4. Literary Hub · Graywolf-authorized toad-crossing excerpt (Michele Hutchison translation)
5. Asymptote · Direct interview with Michele Hutchison (March 11, 2020)
6. London Review Bookshop / Sophie Collins · Direct interview with Rijneveld and Hutchison (June 2020)
7. The Booker Prizes · The Discomfort of Evening, 2020 prize and publication record
8. Grove Atlantic · Small Things Like These, publisher premise
9. New York Review Books · The Summer Book, publisher premise
10. Penguin · The Door, publisher premise (Len Rix translation)
11. Amazon US · Existing English Kindle reference B087ZY9J5K (current offer not freshly checked)