The Discomfort of Evening

‘I don’t see writing as healing, though it sometimes helps me to open up more. I dig into everything I’ve been through and what I’m going through, like a vole. I can be genuinely happy with a phrase I have found, even when the phrase may be full of sadness. For me, it’s about turning something sad or beautiful into art. That way it might be healing: all sentences are given a place they deserve, and I’m the one who puts them in that place – that’s a privileged role.’

Read the full interview here.

‘There’s something both in the intensity of that creative vision and that perspective of a child, but also the translation, that allows you into that world so immediately and so completely. It’s not a book that you can sit back from.

‘It does deal with some very difficult aspects of life – the sudden death of a brother, a family grieving, some of the more unyielding aspects of a religious upbringing, the quite stark backdrop of a Dutch dairy farm, which can be quite a tough place for a child.

‘And yet, there’s something about the inquisitive gaze, that poetic perspective on those things, the ability to see in the everyday something remarkable, extraordinary. Even though it is a book that takes you through some difficult and unsettling cases, it has that ability to make the world new. And I think that is something, especially in our distracted and unsettled moment, to find fiction that has the ability to absolutely root you where you are in the irreducible truth of another life.’

Lily Meyer, NPR

‘Rijneveld writes poetry as well as fiction, which shows: Their prose, in Michele Hutchison’s superb translation, shows a poet’s interest in small, slow details. The novel, which is set on a dairy farm in a small village, is at once spare and luminous, haunting without calling attention to the fact. Rijneveld’s sentences linger, as does their 10-year-old protagonist Jas’s grief for her brother Matthies, who dies in the novel’s first pages […] Bad dreams are a risk for readers here, but Rijneveld manages their novel’s painful content delicately and well. Even the most wrenching scenes never seem gratuitous; they are thoroughly worth the emotional effort that Rijneveld asks their readers to make.’

Chloe Ashby, The Times Literary Supplement

‘As the title warns us, there’s something deeply uncomfortable about Lucas Rijneveld’s The Discomfort of Evening. The way grief relentlessly nibbles away at a family. The emotional and physical torment inflicted on and by children. At times it’s hard to read, and yet, this debut novel, which first appeared in Dutch in 2018, is also beautifully tender and consistently compelling … Rijneveld, who grew up in a Reformed farming family, is a poet as well as a novelist, whose sensuous prose is filled with intoxicating imagery.’

Meg Nolan, The New Statesman

‘Sly, surprising, gently chaotic, it’s the most singular and strident debut I’ve read in a long time … Jas’s language is clean and plain, convincingly childlike, but strikingly poetic – even (or especially) when it is describing the mucky corporeality of rural life. The warts on a toad are like capers, the glands prone to ooze sour oil just like the edible green buds. The smells and excretions of the animals and the banal grotesquery of her interactions with them mount up to portray life as an unlovely thing.’

John Self, The Times

‘When the climax of a book turns on whether or not a character will take off her coat, you can be sure you’re reading a certain strain of modern European fiction. You might know the sort of thing. Bleak with existential dread, a thread of black humour running throughout, delivered in an affectless style […] The electricity in this book comes from the use of that blank narrative style to deliver a sort of Grand Guignol grotesquerie. Everyone and everything suffers in this book, usually in a vicious way.’

Adam Mars-Jones, London Review of Books

‘A first novel that stakes everything on shock value is something of a tradition […] It’s clear that much of the story is intended or imagined to be shocking, but literary shock is a distinct phenomenon from shock as experienced in life or mediated in other ways, through gossip or the news. What shocks in art is not what shocks in life. There needs to be an element of internal tension if the reader is to be troubled in anything but a shallow way.’