The Weight of Grief: Confronting Vulnerability in "The Discomfort of Evening"

Confronting Vulnerability in "The Discomfort of Evening"

The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Reijnevald was first published in Dutch in 2018 by Atlas Contact. The English translation by Michele Hutchison was published in March 2020 by Faber & Faber.

The Discomfort of Evening explores themes of grief, family dynamics, and rural isolation through the eyes of ten-year-old Jas. Set in a devoutly religious farming community in the Netherlands, the novel unflinchingly examines the psychological toll of loss after the accidental death of Jas’s brother. Rijneveld’s evocative prose captures both the innocence and cruelty of childhood, blending poetic imagery with visceral realism.

The novel’s selection for the International Booker Prize was celebrated for its daring narrative and linguistic brilliance. Michele Hutchison’s English translation was praised for preserving the book's haunting beauty while making its deeply personal, culturally specific story accessible to a global audience.

Rijneveld’s win marked not only a literary milestone but also reinforced the prize’s commitment to elevating bold, unconventional voices. Their fearless storytelling resonated with readers and critics alike, solidifying The Discomfort of Evening as a modern literary classic.

Then come the toads. Yes, the toads.

Jas believes her unspoken resentment toward her brother caused his death. In her warped understanding of the world, she’s convinced that if she can force her bucket of toads to mate, her parents might follow suit, restoring happiness to the family. It’s one of her more benign schemes. There’s also the matter of her chronic constipation—a desperate, self-inflicted illness designed to make her parents pay attention, or at least give them something to discuss besides their shared, unbearable grief.

This encapsulates Rijneveld's literary style: earthy, irreverent, and thrillingly uninhibited in both style and subject matter. The Discomfort of Evening is set among dairy farmers who are members of a strict Protestant sect, much like the author’s own family. Rijneveld still works on a farm. The novel teems — admirably — with the raw, unvarnished filth of life.

The title references the time when cows begin to low for relief, their udders heavy with milk. The story explores another kind of painful fullness: emotional burdens that never find release.

The Mulder family has unraveled after the oldest child, a son, dies in an ice-skating accident. Jas, the 10-year-old narrator, refuses to take off her red coat; it hangs on her, increasingly foul-smelling and heavy, its pockets stuffed with toads, rabbit whiskers, and other tokens used in protective rituals she and her siblings perform. Her brother torments animals as sacrifices. Her sister dreams of escaping the farm. Their parents barely speak or touch. Jas, growing up in a home rich in animal-related vocabulary but plagued by silence about human emotions, evaluates her parents with a chilling pragmatism: “This must mean they don’t mate either.”

The story draws from Rijneveld’s life. They grew up fearing a “threatening, cruel God” and experienced personal tragedy after losing a sibling. Rijneveld’s parents are still “too frightened” to read the novel.

This reaction seems entirely reasonable. I approached the novel cautiously, having heard about its graphic depictions of animal cruelty and troubling explorations of childhood sexuality. Translator Michele Hutchison admitted that certain passages, especially those involving incest, were emotionally taxing: “I’d tend not to do those passages at the end of the day, in case I would get nightmares.”

The novel didn’t give me nightmares — only because sleep felt unattainable. Rijneveld stirs primal fears and creates new ones. Even now, vivid images flash in my mind: a pull-tab from a can of Coke, the horrifying scene where Jas and her brother lure a local girl into the farm’s “sperm barn.” The description is brief but harrowing — Patrick Bateman might envy its stark efficiency.

And then there are the toads. I feel compelled to extend a personal apology to all toads.

What shocks isn’t just the violence — it’s the innocence intertwined with it. The novel’s brutality targets small, vulnerable bodies — animals and children alike — by perpetrators who are themselves young, lacking the language or tools to process their trauma. Jas’s narration is metaphor-rich, yet her metaphors remain grounded in the animal world; she cannot connect to anything human. As her parents retreat into grief, the children invent their own distorted cosmology, where moral boundaries dissolve in confusion and desperation. Victim and perpetrator merge in ways that are deeply unsettling.

Even with a strong stomach, The Discomfort of Evening is a daunting read. And yet, I returned to it daily, driven by a surprising sense of gratitude. That gratitude came from not being condescended to. Many novels fail not just through poor writing but by offering a sanitized, simplistic version of reality. Fiction about childhood is especially prone to this flaw, though exceptions exist — Jean Stafford’s work comes to mind. Rijneveld’s expansive, fearless imagination offers both terror and solace. Their refusal to flinch from extremity — rendered with stark clarity in Hutchison’s translation — honors the enormity of the children’s grief and emotional starvation.

As with any work probing complicity and repression, The Discomfort of Evening invites allegorical readings. Michael Haneke’s film The White Ribbon, centered on children in a pre-World War I German village engaging in secretive, brutal rituals, comes to mind. Both works explore punitive religious environments, cycles of violence, and suppressed traumas. However, where Haneke draws explicit historical parallels, Rijneveld weaves such themes more subtly, allowing them to linger as spectral undercurrents rather than overt statements.

Jas’s world is steeped in a suffocating religious dogma that mirrors historical patterns of repression and cruelty. At school, she learns about the Holocaust—one of history’s starkest examples of collective denial and moral collapse—suggesting a continuum of human capacity for both forgetting and enduring suffering. Yet these historical echoes remain peripheral, present but never fully realized. Rijneveld resists reducing the narrative to mere symbolism, anchoring the story in Jas’s intimate and deeply personal experience.

We return, inevitably, to Jas in her stained, non-symbolic red coat filled with toads—her private rebellion against a world stripped of comfort and safety. Her coat is not a metaphor but a reality soaked in filth, a shield against a universe that offers little refuge. The Discomfort of Evening dares us to confront the unvarnished truth that even Jas’s parents can’t face: the relentless presence of grief and its insidious impact.

As Rijneveld has noted, “Discomfort is pure because it’s when we’re vulnerable. It’s when we’re being ourselves instead of pretending to be who we want to be.” The novel extends this challenge to its readers: Can we sit with discomfort long enough to understand it—not as a riddle to be solved but as a shared, undeniable human condition? In the end, The Discomfort of Evening is less a parable and more a reckoning—an unflinching exploration of loss that refuses to offer easy resolutions.