The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld
Published 2020 · 75,539 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is The Discomfort of Evening to read?
The Discomfort of Evening scores 52 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 38 out of 100
- Rijneveld writes in a child's voice using concrete, rural Dutch vocabulary — udder ointment, beet crusher, boot-jack. The translator Michele Hutchison preserves this plain register. Agricultural and Reformed Church terminology appears throughout but context always clarifies.
- Sentence structure: 42 out of 100
- Sentences run at moderate length, often strung together with dashes and commas in a child's associative pattern. Jas narrates in flowing present tense that mimics stream of consciousness but remains grammatically straightforward. No Jamesian subordination or Faulknerian tangles.
- Abstraction: 35 out of 100
- The novel stays rooted in physical, sensory reality: greasy tins, frozen stollen, chocolate frogs wrapped in silver foil. Jas processes grief and trauma through her body and the animals around her rather than through philosophical reflection. Biblical quotations appear as rote recitations, not conceptual frameworks.
- Information density: 40 out of 100
- Each chapter unfolds a single timeline at walking pace. The rural farm setting and family constellation are established early and stay consistent. Symbolic motifs — the coat, the toads, the freezer — accumulate gradually rather than demanding the reader track competing systems of meaning.
- Narrative indirection: 62 out of 100
- Jas describes what she sees and does with a child's literal eye, but the gap between her understanding and the reader's drives the novel's horror. She reports sexual abuse, animal cruelty, and family disintegration without fully grasping their significance. The reader infers the emotional and moral weight the narrator cannot articulate.
- Symbolic density: 65 out of 100
- The coat Jas refuses to remove functions as armor, identity, and eventually a shroud. The toads she carries represent the doomed attempt to sustain life. The freezer at the novel's end mirrors the frozen lake where Matthies drowned. These symbols operate through physical accumulation rather than literary allusion.
- Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
- Rijneveld maintains a child's sincere voice throughout, but the gap between Jas's innocent narration and what the reader understands creates dramatic irony. There is no satirical stance or tonal play — the distance comes from the narrator's inability to name what is happening to her.
- Resolution withholding: 72 out of 100
- The novel ends with Jas climbing into the freezer, kicking away the pole, and whispering 'I'm coming, dear Matthies.' Whether she dies, is rescued, or remains suspended is never resolved. The family's disintegration has no redemptive arc. The ending seals rather than resolves.
- Structural complexity: 35 out of 100
- Thirteen chapters told chronologically from a single first-person perspective. The timeline moves forward from the days before Christmas through the winter. No POV shifts, no temporal fragmentation, no formal experiments.
How The Discomfort of Evening is regarded
The Discomfort of Evening holds a literary regard score of 46 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.