In Lucas Rijneveld’s new novel, My Heavenly Favourite, translated from the Dutch by Michele Hutchinson, we follow a 49-year old vet recounting his love for a 14-year-old girl. Set in countryside Netherlands, the story begins with the pleading, vulnerable voice of a man who has lost himself in love. The voice begs its readers to believe in the powerlessness he has encountered. The sense of deception is striking and blows bit by bit as the story unfolds.
The plot seems to have picked up right from where The Discomfort of Evening— Rijneveld’s 2020 Booker winning novel—ended. The 14-year-old girl—reminiscient of the 10-year old Jas from the 2020 book—is grieving her brother. The family is in chaos in the aftermath of the foot-and-mouth epidemic of the cows, shattering their livelihood.
The girl listens to The Cranberries. She reads and imagines Freud speaking to her. She wants to fly. She tries to get wings to set off into the air. But she realises she needs the male phallus, or ‘prongs’ for that. So, now she longs for the male phallus. She wants it for herself. She does not want to be a girl anymore. The vet, whom she’s begun calling Kurt, after the legendary singer, befriends her and shows her the phallus of an otter as he dissects it with a scalpel. The urge to have herself sliced in half comes so strong to the girl that she lies on the metal bed and jabs the scalpel in her thighs. The vet is surprised, but he takes the first step. He makes her feel the male ‘prong’ through his pants while dressing her wound.
The insistence on believing in love over the conscience bestowed socially is an important question the author raises almost by accident, or perhaps consciously. Kate Elizabeth Russell wrote My Dark Vanessa on the same theme in 2020. It is written from the perspective of the victim—Vanessa. As an adult, she recounts being sexually abused by her 41-year old teacher. Russell clarified that her objective was not to make the teacher into a monster, but to examine the deeper personal and cultural problems of such relationships without demonising the man because of his age and troubled past.
Rijneveld makes a similar attempt by giving voice to the vet’s past. In chapters with almost no full-stops, paragraphs run on end with flashes of the vet’s relationship with his mother, the nightmare he wakes up to till this day, and his inability to escape his desires for his ‘heavenly one’.
The story comes close to Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. In fact, the vet’s first-person narration makes direct allusions to it. The theme of hebephilia (erotic preference for pubescent children) ties the two novels together with that of the manipulative narration to the court. He admits feeling like TS Eliot’s ‘hollow men’. He knows the world would end for him with ‘a whimper’ and not with a bang.
It’s a searing, slow-burn read of survival in the face of emotional loneliness. It is fraught with Freudian tension. But, it is not a tale of primal sexual jealousy. It reverses it when it shows the vet feeling jealous of his adolescent son, who begins dating his ‘heavenly favourite’. The voice is so convincing that it is almost difficult for the reader to not sympathise with the vet.
The reader is left angry as the end arrives. The rage at the crime, which we had somehow preempted, is arresting. The rape scenes evoke tremendous hate, a testimony to the author’s skill at weaving provocative visuals.
At many points, the story can feel all over the place with its pop-culture references and literary allusions. It comes in the way of the story, but the stream of consciousness narration makes up for it. Rijneveld’s novel is a disturbing yet successful exploration of power imbalances; the blurred lines between crime and desire. It has the power to unsettle the readers, or leave them spellbound with its far-reaching descriptions.
My Heavenly Favourite
By: Lucas Rijneveld
Publisher: Macmillan
Pages: 285
Price: Rs 0009