‘Discomfort’

cult to bear.

However strong your readerly constitution, it might feel like a peculiar time to pick up a book so mournful and gory. And yet, I went to it every day without dread, with, in fact, a gratitude that surprisedme. It was the gratitude of not being condescended to. Novels disappoint not only by being clumsily written or conceived but by presenting a version of the world that is simpler and more sanitized than we know it to be. Fiction about childhood is especially prone, with a few notable exceptions (the work of

Jean Stafford, for example). The spaciousness of Rijneveld’s imagination comes as terror and solace. That lack of squeamishness, that frightening extremity, which, in Hutchison’s clean, calm translation, never feels showy or manipulative, gives full voice to the enormity of the children’s grief, their obscene deprivation.

As with any novel so interested in complicity and repression, there’s a temptation to read “The Discomfort of Evening” as a parable. I was frequently reminded of Michael Haneke’s film “The White Ribbon,” about the savage, secretive rituals of a group of children in a German village before World War I. It’s another excoriation of a punitive Protestantism and familial cycles of violence, which Haneke holds responsible for creating a society vulnerable to fascist ideology. The cowed children of the film enact their humiliations on one another. They will grow up, we understand, to become Nazis. “The Discomfort of Evening” is not nearly so explicit. Jas is studying the Holocaust at school. Her questions and preoccupations gesture at the links between the individual and the collective’s capacity for denial and willed amnesia.

But these are intimations only, embers. We return always to Jas, in her smelly, decidedly non- allegorical coat, filled with toads. We return to her story that feels like a dare — can we face it when even her parents have turned away? Will we succumb to discomfort or will we find in that discomfort a harsh and surprising lesson — the writer’s credo? “Discomfort is pure because it’s when we’re vulnerable,” Rijneveld has said. “It’s when we’re being ourselves instead of pretending to be who we want to be.”