James Tait Black Memorial Prizes
My Heavenly Favourite: FROM THE WINNERS OF THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE
Set in rural Netherlands in 2005, this troubling novel follows the dangerous relationship between a young farmer's daughter and a local veterinarian. It is read as a psychological drama in which the suffocating logic of a closed community collides with desire and loss.
Work Information
Desire and obsession slowly crack open a closed community.
Through the relationship between a young farmer's daughter and a village veterinarian, the novel traces the collapse of the boundary between affection and control, fantasy and violence. It is introduced as a long novel in which an apparently quiet rural setting becomes a stage for a deep and lingering psychological unease.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Faber & Faber
- Published
- 2024-02-01
- Pages
- 352 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 14 x 2.8 x 22.3 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780571375493
- ISBN-10
- 0571375499
- Price
- 4221 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Literary
SENSATIONAL WINNERS OF THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 'It's been a long time since a novel has destroyed me like this . . . One of the boldest writers alive today.' Max Porter 'A novel of exquisite discomfort and delicious poetry . . . Made me laugh and gasp . . . I'm in awe.' Brandon Taylor 'Rejuvenating, glorious, brilliant. A book about obsession with prose that obsessed me from the first line.' Daisy Johnson In the tempestuous summer of 2005, a local veterinarian becomes enraptured by a 14-year-old farmer's daughter - his 'favourite' - as he tends her father's cows. This deeply troubled soul is our narrator: a man who believes he offers the object of his love a tantalizing path out of the constrictions of her conservative rural life, a chance to escape to a world of fantasy. But the obsessive reliance he cultivates builds into a terrifying trap, with a crime and confession at the heart of it that threatens to rip their small community apart. An unflinching excavation of taboos and social norms, My Heavenly Favourite is a torrent of grief and obsession. The remarkable and chilling successor to Lucas Rijneveld's international sensation, The Discomfort of Evening, this profane novel is powered by the paradoxical beauty of its prose, which holds the reader fast to the page. Translated by Michele Hutchison This novel is about an adult who is sexually attracted to a minor and contains sexual violence.
Lucas Rijneveld (b. 1991) grew up in a Reformed farming family in North Brabant before moving to Utrecht. One of the greatest new voices in Dutch literature , his first poetry collection, Calf's Caul , was awarded the C. Buddingh' Prize for best poetry debut in 2015, with the newspaper de Volkskrant naming them literary talent of the year. In 2018, Atlas Contact published his first novel, The Discomfort of Evening , which won the prestigious ANV Debut Prize and was a national bestseller. The UK edition won the Booker International Prize 2020 . Alongside his writing career, Rijneveld works on a dairy farm. Michele Hutchison was born in the UK and has lived in Amsterdam since 2004. After a period working as an editor, she became a literary translator from Dutch, and recently translated Lucas Rijneveld's The Discomfort of Evening which won the Booker International Prize 2020.
Reviews
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If you ever wanted to know what is going through the mind of a predator then this is the book for you. I will give you caution that this book is disgusting and will cause some PTSD for those that have been through sexual abuse.
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I found this book difficult. It's a fairly shapeless stream of consciousness [as streams of consciousness generally are] and I accept this form but..... it just becomes too hard,too directionless. I get it that the novel is very clever but there can be too much of a good things. Of course,the subject matter is challenging,too. How much do we want to know about the mind of a man who is besotted with a young girl? All very cleverly done but I lost my connection in the end.
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This is not a novel for those with a weak stomach or who are easily triggered. It is a nihilistic, no-holding-back work dealing with mental illness and pedophilia. The stream-of-consciousness narrative concerns a middle-aged vet – himself the victim of sexual abuse by his mother – who develops an unhealthy obsession with a fourteen-year-old girl who has psychological problems of her own. The fact that it is written in the first person (as was ‘Lolita’ – to which it offers obvious comparisons) makes it even more disturbing. Some of the passages are a very hard read, and I was tempted on several occasions to put the book down and not pick it up again. The poetic style, however, along with the author’s psychological insight, just about saves it from tipping into outright pornography. But be warned. It’s exceptionally dark.
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The plot is interesting and unpredictable, very reminiscent of Lolita with stronger themes of mental illness. Devastatingly sad, a grotesque and unlikeable and unreliable narrator, and a very strange run on writing style. Periods are almost never used, only commas. Parts are too disturbing to read in my opinion as the narrator describes assaulting another character on multiple occasions, would not recommend to anyone sensitive to descriptions of SA. That being said this is gorgeously written and a unique story. Definitely not for the faint of heart.
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I thought this book was absolutely phenomenal. Rijneveld is such an incredibly unique author that without a doubt is certainly not for everyone. Much like his previous work, The Discomfort of Evening, this book is extremely polarizing in that the topics it tackles are not for the faint of heart. I am obsessed with Rijneveld’s writing style and would at this point consider him one of my favorite authors. For those who enjoy transgressive literature, I would highly recommend this.