Document in“DIOPTRA-L”

For decades, Dutch literature has been dominated by tormented male authors, men who mostly wrote about middle-aged men, completely stuck in life, full of frustration, mostly drinking, and often with a very derogatory view of the opposite sex. Epigones such as Jeroen Brouwers, A.F.Th. Van der Heijden, Leon De Winter, and to a lesser degree Tom Lanoye and Arnon Grunberg (I agree, the latter two focus on a slightly younger generation and have different accents) brought this genre to unprecedented heights thanks to their exceptional literary talent. Most of their stories are gems to read, although you can get irritated by their extreme miserabilism. I have the impression that a new generation has emerged in the Dutch literary landscape, and this time of young women and men, with a different take on life. Halleluia! I'm not going to give a list here, but Marieke Lucas Rijneveld (° 1991) definitely belongs to that new literary top. Immediately, from page 1, he* succeeds in getting our full attention with a distinctive style that is ultra-imaginative and focussed on tangible details, referring to life on the farm. The story is about a girl of 10 to 12 years old who grows up on a farm in the Dutch Bible Belt, in an atmosphere of suffocating doctrinal rigidity. The central drama is the death of her eldest brother, who drowns when skating, a few days before Christmas. Our protagonist describes the shock this causes to her and especially to her family, her remaining brother and sister and her parents. She mercilessly portrays how the accident destroys life on the farm (almost literally), and especially the traumatic consequences this has for her growing up. Yes, this is indeed a coming-of-age story, but one with a very sharp and bitter edge. Our protagonist has no name, we just learn that after the accident she refuses to ever take off her red coat, and is therefore sometimes simply called "Jas/Coat". This can count as a way of shielding herself from the outside world. “Jas/Coat" also copes with the trauma by escaping into a world of utmost sensibility, desperately trying to experience what her brother must have felt. This gradually results in all kinds of little, but cruel experiments, including on a sexual level. Of course, the seemingly unshakable faith of her parents is constantly being dealt with: the religious prescriptions are stripped down with ruthless sarcasm, while at the same time for “Jas/Coat” they remain the ultimate point of reference. The charm of the story lies above all in the open-mindedness of our young narrator, who mercilessly records minor but significant details, and constantly questions everything, driven by a search for herself and for the attention of her parents who are drifting away. She describes her situation very graphically as a stuck state, concretely illustrated by her "poo problem", which recurs almost throughout the book. Likewise the whole family, and the farm, are impregnated by death. Towards the end of the book everything seems to derail and the story gets rather macabre aspects that push it towards a grotesque. To be honest, there the author lost me: in my opinion, Rijneveld takes his exuberant imagery just a bit too far, drowning the story with it. I am by no means the first to say this, but Rijneveld's story is very reminiscent of Het smelt ("Melting"), by Lize Spit, another young epigone of Dutch literature. The theme and especially the tenor of the two books is largely the same (a youth in the countryside, in a suffocating bourgeois/religious atmosphere), certain incidents and situations are very related (a traumatic experience that ruins a young life, and - typically - in both novels there is a rope hanging over a beam in the shed or in the attic) and even the denouement of the two books is very similar. Of course, there are differences, and both have their own, distinctive strength: with Spit it is the ingenious composition that stands out, but with Rijneveld it is the expressive quality of his prose that is phenomenal. Neither are uplifting reads, they both grab you by the throat. Though, in my opinion, 'The Discomfort of Evening' is not a complete success, Rijneveld shows that he has a lot to offer. I am very eager to read his next one. * I've re-edited my original review, since Rijneveld has made it clear he wants to be labelled in the male category.