When English writer Max Porter tweaked Emily Dickinson’s words about hope into a reflection on bereavement for his debut novel, Grief is the Thing with Feathers, his core offering was that grief could be many things – “perching in the soul, light and dark, unfixed, moving, proportioned to the life.” In Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s novel, The Discomfort of Evening, which has made the 29-year-old author the youngest and the first Dutch writer to win the 2020 Booker International Prize, grief is the hollow of a brother’s body in the middle of the mattress.
“It’s the shape left by death and whichever way I turn it or flip it over, the hollow stays a hollow that I try not to end up in,” writes the novel’s 10-year-old narrator, Jas, while trying to come to terms with the loss of Matthies, the oldest of four siblings, who dies in a skating accident a day before…