The Discomfort of Evening
Marieke Lucas Rijneveld · 2020
A Dutch girl processes her brother's death in a rural Christian community through increasingly disturbing behavior. The debut winner of the International Booker Prize, and an unsettling, precisely imagined novel of grief and religious repression.
The case against
The grimness is a method and the method never varies: animal cruelty, bodily fluids, children doing unspeakable things in a house where no adult ever intervenes. Half its reviewers called it a masterpiece; the other half asked whether accumulated disgust counts as structure. There is no relief on any page, which is the point, and also the length of the point.
Best of Last 10 Years · the Pro canon
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