Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, trans. by Michele Hutchison
MixedThe Times (UK)When the climax of a book turns on whether or not a character will take off her coat, you can be sure you’re reading a certain strain of modern European fiction. You might know the sort of thing. Bleak with existential dread, a thread of black humour running throughout, delivered in an affectless style ... The electricity in this book comes from the use of that blank narrative style to deliver a sort of Grand Guignol grotesquerie. Everyone and everything suffers in this book, usually in a vicious way ... All this could read like a satire on the religious notion that suffering ennobles us, which inspires the novel’s title ...if it wasn’t done with such relish. In the end it reads more like a young writer’s weakness for the ersatz glamour of the deeply bleak and is heavy on the similes ... In the end this is an effective, albeit often sickening novel that shows a physical rendering of grief and the compound effects of trauma.
