Mowabites Worldwide

“I lay down on the cold flagstones with my arms alongside my body and watched Dad unfold a tape measure and lay it from head to toe, and I thought: if you saw off the bed legs and take away the mattress, you could easily turn it into a coffin… I’d like to be laid facing down in it, with the viewing window at the height of my bum so that everyone could say goodbye and look at my bum hole…”

– From The Discomfort of Evening, by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld. Translated by Michele Hutchison.

The Discomfort of Evening follows a strict Christian farming family in the rural Netherlands as they collapse under the weight of grief after their eldest son, Matthies, drowns during an ice-skating accident.

Traumatized by the loss and paralyzed by guilt—having previously prayed for God to take her brother instead of her pet rabbit—ten-year-old Jas navigates a world of profound emotional neglect as her parents sink into silent depression. Left to their own devices, Jas and her surviving siblings try to make sense of death, sexuality, and their changing bodies through increasingly disturbing, violent rituals and morbid curiosities. Symbolized by Jas’s refusal to remove her filthy red winter coat, the novel chronicles the raw, unfiltered, and tragic disintegration of childhood innocence in the face of unaddressed family trauma.

For me, reading this book has been a delight. The story is told from the perspective of a ten-year old girl who says what she sees and feels without filter, rendering the read rich, raw, delicious like fruit juice full of fibre.

I think a great treasure many lose is detachment from the fond memories of childhood. If only we will look back, no matter how bitter our upbringing, there will always be something beautiful, something interesting to cherish, to relish, to share.

Next week, I start a new book. And I can’t wait to share my findings.