Rijneveld, Marieke Lucas: With evening comes distress - iLiteratura.cz

Rijneveld, Marieke Lucas: With evening comes distress - iLiteratura.cz

The Distress of the Lost BirdsMarieke Lucas Rijneveld: With evening comes distress. From the Dutch original, De avond is inconvenient trans. Veronika ter Harmsel Havlíková, Argo, Prague, 2021, 248 p.

The ways of the Lord are unpredictable, and so even in a global age centered on fast-paced media consumption, it may happen that the prestigious International Booker Prize goes to the English translation of a debut novel set in the setting of a Dutch cattle farm. It was certainly a small miracle when Marieke Lucas Rijneveld's The Evening Comes Distress received this prize, but not the libation of the desperately invoked otherness that people in the late modern age frantically seek to balance their urban congestion and detachment from the natural basis of life. But the writer's book, because Marieke Lucas bears these two names precisely to express a certain gender (in)eligibility, did not attract the attention of some popularly involved topic, but rather the captivating writing, which is also evidenced by the Czech translation of the book.

Translation of the Dutch world into Czech was done by Veronika ter Harmsel Havlíková and it must be added that it is a masterpiece, which can be felt from the beginning in the Barthesian pleasure of reading. The contribution of the translation to the suggestiveness of the book, into which the reader falls almost immediately, is certainly very strong in this case. Most of them can verify this by simply comparing it with the award-winning English version, because Czechs are usually very far from Dutch.

Rijneveld does not write an autobiography, even though he comes from the world of a Calvinistic farm, and it might be appropriate to ask whether it is literature or just notes from the family home. The world in which she lived, she re-creates in a literary way, it doesn't really matter how these worlds overlap or pass. Literature is a separate world and does not need to be interpreted as references to real reality. The fact that the world of the novel Trouble Comes in the Evening is real and does not need the "based on a true story" pretense is easy for everyone to recognize from the fact that the sentences and words of the novel are able to move through the reader's body. Just as the word of God governing the life of the farming community becomes a physical, actively acting body in practical life.

Evening Distress enters the world of a ten-year-old girl who hides herself from the dangers of the world with her red jacket – hence her characteristic nickname – through the death of her older brother Matthies. An important piece has fallen out of the perfect family unit, organized according to God's will and nature's commands, which pervade each other conspicuously. This whole micro-world and the relationships in it are seriously moving. The self-evident certainty of co-existence is shaken, but also every separate existence. Each family member experiences the loss of a piece of themselves in different ways. The breakdown of family security, which until now was guaranteed by a strong bond with God, is felt physically by Bunda, but it is also reflected in her exuberant imagination, which is undergoing a maturation process. Something definitely falls out of it so that something else can enter it.

Rijneveld, Marieke Lucas: With the evening comes distress - iLiteratura.cz

Marieke Lucas Rijneveld is as fresh and direct in her metaphorical expression of this movement as the farm environment from which she draws. As another stroke of God, the foot-and-mouth disease epidemic hits him. Those who remember the apocalyptic images of burning piles of cattle that flooded the minds of more perceptive Europeans more than twenty years ago due to mad cow disease (BSE) can relive this animal holocaust. This time also as a symbol of God's punishment and cleansing of the unclear guilt associated with the death of a close person whom we failed to protect. "Each loss carries with it all the previous attempts to hold on to something that one does not want to lose, but still has to give it up," writes the narrator. "From a bag full of beautiful marbles and rare glasses to my brother." Loss is also an attempt to renovate or reconstruct the world in which we lived, but Bunda succeeds in this perhaps differently than she would have imagined, after all, like most of those who is trying to fill the void after Matthies' death in his own way. With the possible exception of Brother Obbe. The latter naturally fulfills the model of paternal power, because it is he who is now destined by God's law to continue the tradition of the entire farm instead of his brother.

God's blow - Matthies' death, the toads, the mass destruction of cattle in the slaughterhouse and many other signs - is always also a call to renew faith, to renegotiate the relationship with God, who seems to have abandoned his good daughters and sons in the place the deepest pain. Doubts of faith are manifested by the loss of rituals that suddenly no longer have meaning, by the breaking of the daily rhythm of service to the farming cause, but also by a desperate cry of direct protest against God's representative on earth, i.e. the church. While the parents slowly lose themselves in the pain and coping with it, Bunda finds herself in this family crisis, subconsciously trying to shed her old skin, like a snake when it needs to revive and extend its life span. "I wish we could undress from our own body, free from the paganism that rests on us," Bunda sighs.

Grief is the loss of meaning, the work of grieving is an attempt to regain it. As Freud says – to find a relevant replacement for the lost object of love (libido), to rediscover a solid point in the sea of ​​uncertainty that we could hang on to and cling to with hope. Bunda, in the enchanting writing of Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, can say it much more poetically, yet just as accurately: "In loss we find ourselves and who we are: beings as vulnerable as featherless birds who fall out of the nest here and there and hope to be there again someone will return…”

© Petr Fischer

Tags: