Review: The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld [Literary Fiction]
Rating: 1/5 stars.
"According to the pastor, discomfort is good. In discomfort we are real."
This quote sums up the whole book - but not in a good way.The Discomfort of Evening is the classic Misery Porn that is so common in literary fiction. (Personally I think "literary fiction" is just genre fiction wearing a monocle and smoking a cigar, but lets not talk about why I think the whole term is stupid right now.)
It was the epitome of "literary fiction" in basically every single way - the Hemingway-esque prose (i.e. not poetic or purple; minimalist), a series of increasingly terrible events, burgeoning childhood/adolescent sexual awakenings tainted by said terrible events, and of course you mustn't forget to point out how hypocritical religion is.
Unfortunately, I've become accustomed to literary fiction being depressing to the point of farce, so I wasn't particularly surprised. The literary consensus seems to be that happy endings are for genre fiction, especially romance, and literary fiction is all about being Serious with Gritty Realism that always manifests as awful things happening because life is pain and full of misery, apparently. I don't want to stop reading literary fiction, because some can do depressing books well (The Secret History, Lolita), and some don't have a wholly depressing ending (The Great Gatsby, Cloud Atlas).
The Discomfort of Evening is a novel about a deep, roling depression that takes over the family after the death of the eldest son. You would think, then, that we got a lot of emotional insights - but we didn't. The author took "show, not tell" to its extreme, so we hardly ever know precisely what Jas is feeling, which in turn creates a disconnect between the reader and the main character. It was just all a bit flat, and pointless. An entirely pointless book with incredibly mediocre writing; although this might be a translation issue, I doubt it.
And this won the International Booker Prize. My God. When are Serious Literature people going to stop going crazy over wanky stuff like this which is basically just, "I'm a child on the cusp of being a teenager and a tragedy has happened but my parents refuse to talk about it so everything is fucked I guess. Oh and BTW, religion is bad."
It's like the author was like, "Oh fuck, I just realised my book is a load of pointless wank, I'd better shoehorn some social commentary into it! Uhhhh religious people are hypocritical. Yup, that should do it."
I have no idea how I read this whole thing without skimming, actually. Forget the International Booker Prize, I think I deserve some sort of prize for finishing this in its entirety.
