Dutch author Lucas Rijneveld (formerly Marieke Lucas Rijneveld) won the International Booker prize with his debut, The Discomfort of Evening, narrated by a farmer’s daughter coaxed into sex games with her siblings after their brother dies in a freak accident. There are scenes involving pilfered vials of bull sperm and an insemination gun; the protagonist, aged 12 by the end of the book, fantasises about the tongue of a local vet who tells her how pretty she is. For overseas readers, it evoked “Ian Macabre”-era McEwan, but Rijneveld cited the impact of the transgressive Dutch novelist Jan Wolkers, as well as his own childhood – a girlhood – in a Protestant farming family after the tragic death of his own brother, hit by a bus on the way to school.
Now comes Rijneveld’s second novel, My Heavenly Favourite. A dark mirror to his first book, it’s narrated in torrential run-on sentences by a paedophile livestock vet recounting his manipulation of a client’s 14-year-old daughter in the wake of her brother’s death in a hit-and-run accident. Unfolding over a single summer in 300-odd pages, the book contains just 42 paragraphs and (I’d guess) barely as many full stops – a mark, perhaps, that the protagonist knows no limits.
