The Discomfort of Evening

"I get tingles when I even think about this book. It’s absolutely extraordinary. Let me start with the story. This is about a family in rural Holland, narrated by a young girl who is living out her daily routine on the farm. She has a family who have the ritual of farming and of cows and of milking. ‘The discomfort of evening,’ the title phrase, is the point in the evening when cows start to low because they’re udders are full of milk. The detail in this book is just absolutely spellbinding. It makes you feel like being on a Dutch dairy farm is the most revelatory and fascinating place you could possibly be. One of the central dynamics in the book – it’s quite early in the book, so I don’t think this is a spoiler – is that the young girl’s brother dies quite abruptly, and the night before he dies she says a little prayer to God – in the way that children sometimes do – to take away her brother instead of her rabbit. The next day he dies. The rest of the book she’s dealing with pangs of guilt, the feeling that she has caused his death. This is a secret she doesn’t share at all with anyone. It’s just this internalized guilt that she feels. “I get tingles when I even think about this book. It’s absolutely extraordinary” So, it’s a book about a bodily awakening, about bodily dysfunction. But it’s also a book about the ties of family and how robust and how brittle they can become in extremis. Because it is written with such poetic precision and an almost hallucinatory level of detail, this is a book in which it feels as though language is being discovered for the first time. The narrator is discovering themselves, discovering words, discovering ways of describing the world. There is an extraordinary freshness to the prose. It feels as though you are absolutely in the dairy farm, in the bath, in bed with this person going to sleep. I think many of us on the panel had this extraordinary feeling that we were just completely immersed in this character’s life. The translation is absolutely remarkable because this is a work of fiction that relies on the kind of strangeness and precision of perception of the narrator and also the author. It’s not at all conventional. It doesn’t have a conventional narrative style. So it requires immense flexibility and a virtuoso sense of playfulness to capture that in English. It’s just a fantastic book. Actually, many of the books on the shortlist are immensely joyous and funny. One misapprehension is the idea that these books require extra effort to read, compared to books written in English. It’s almost the opposite. These are, I think, six of the most elating reading experiences I’ve had in years – out of books written in English or books in translation. I think elating is the word because they are affirming and enlivening, without glossing over the darker aspects of life, or rather precisely because they don’t. When we’re all locked in our houses and isolated as we are now, these are books that give you a very deep kind of companionship. Sometimes it is a rough and raw kind of companionship, which shows you the gritty underbelly of life, but perhaps that kind of total intimacy is the very thing we’re missing most at the moment. I love reading fiction written in English too of course, but it is striking how formally playful much of the writing beyond the Anglophone bubble is. There’s a sense that playfulness and being inventive with structure or voice is such a fundamental aspect of each of these six books, not just tacked on for literary effect. And that sense of invention is channeled into characters and stories that feel utterly compelling and leave a lasting impact. This sense of play can make a Dutch dairy farm a place of startling revelation, or can fill you with wonder at the Argentinean Pampas or a Japanese island in which the arrival of a bird is strange and new. What could be more joyful than seeing the world anew? Or feeling a pang of recognition by being immersed in a life far from your own? A good translation makes it possible for you to enter these worlds without any profound cultural knowledge of the places that you’re going to, though you might acquire it as you go. What I love about that kind of reading experience is that the knowledge you acquire is on a human scale – it’s measured in terms of lives and relationships, rather than in the abstract, which I find always stays with me. A good translation enables that journey and renders you fluent in another culture. So rather than it being harder to read fiction in translation, a good translation is doing the legwork to spirit you into another world. The really wonderful thing is that you discover suddenly how much you have in common with someone in Revolutionary Iran or plague-era Germany, or wherever it may be, and it’s through the magical process of translation that it happens."