My Heavenly Favourite, the second novel from acclaimed Dutch author Lucas Rijneveld, belongs to a tiny, controversial subgenre: novels about child sex abuse rendered in exquisite prose. It is all the more transgressive in that it’s narrated by the abuser, who addresses his victim in an incantatory, unflinchingly graphic second-person rant about his eternal love. Such a book has to clear a very high bar not to seem like a cynical exercise. Rijneveld’s novel leaps effortlessly over, with room to spare.
The narrator is a 49-year-old vet serving a small farming community in the Netherlands, and his “heavenly favourite” is the troubled 14-year-old daughter of a dairy farmer. Neither is given a name: he calls her “Little Bird” or “Putto”; she calls him “Kurt” for Kurt Cobain. Little Bird is an outsider for her intellectual precocity, for what may be a budding psychosis, and for her secret, obsessive desire to have a penis. She is also sexually naive for her age, having been raised in a strict religious family, in which communication was short-circuited by the tragic death of her older sibling and the desertion of her mother. This echoes Rijneveld’s first novel, the International Booker-winning The Discomfort of Evening; both books draw on the author’s background.
