“I slowly crawled under your skin like a liver fluke in a cow, there isn’t a more pleasant way of putting it: I was a parasite.”
Two thousand and twenty International Booker Prize winner Lucas Rijnevel’s new novel My Heavenly Favourite – translated from the Dutch by Michele Hutchison – opens with a 49-year-old male narrator “coming straight out with it” to his 14-year-old beloved about the enormous affection he feels for her. He addresses her as though narrating a monologue, or writing a very long letter, to try to convince her that what had transpired between them was an inevitable consequence of his love. It is not perversion – irrespective of what the rest of the world has come to believe.
There are occasional addresses to a “court”, a jury that seems to have forced the narrator to recount the “relationship” from the moment it set into motion. A vet by profession, the narrator was called into the farm by the girl’s father to treat the sick livestock. It was, what one would call popularly, “love at first sight”. The child’s virgin beauty is perceived by him as he would a healthy cow’s – her skin is as tender as an udder and she is of perfect health, unlike the cows on the farm that have contracted the bluetongue disease. In the initial days of no-contact, the narrator convinces himself that the girl wants to be seen as a 14-year-old “adult” – a belief that he holds on to as he violates the social (and legal) limits of adult-child intimacy.
Growing pains
The girl is attuned to American pop culture and current affairs despite living in rural Netherlands. She spends long afternoons listening to The Cranberries and develops a fascination with Kurt Cobain. A crucial moment in her childhood is 9/11 – an event that she is almost sure she has caused. Her frenzied teenage thoughts wander to Freud, Hitler, and penis envy, before settling on something as mundane as kissing 14-year-old boys in the swimming pool. When she wonders about how boys feel about the “prongs” between their legs, the narrator without any delay carves out a male otter’s penis and hands it to her for further examination. Her curiosity about the male member leads to stranger interactions with the narrator who takes it upon himself to educate the girl about the various curiosities of the human body and its sexual impulses.
As if the girl kissing boys her age wasn’t bad enough, the narrator’s anguish reaches its peak when he discovers that his older son has claimed her as his girlfriend. They sit together at dinner tables and go on road trips, and the narrator watches his wife Camillia become fond of the child. The breakup when it happens floods him with relief and joy as he reads it as the girl’s clear consent to define their relationship, give some structure to it, which had not been possible until then.
An illusion of love and loneliness
The narrator’s fevered monologue to the girl whom he does not call by name and instead addresses her by divine terms – my heavenly favourite, for instance – almost convinces the reader that perhaps this man has been misjudged. It is after all, possible to feel great love for a child and perhaps this man, without really meaning to, or in a manner misunderstood by us, conveyed his love in ways that he thought were best, and acceptable. In a telling moment, the narrator reflects on his own childhood and squarely blames his mother for “allowing” things to go “so far” – he remembers himself as a “needy” boy who just wanted to “play”, and now, with the girl, the opportunity had been finally presented to him. Unfortunately for them, his “suffocating lust” got in the way.
This stirs feelings of sympathy in the reader – perhaps the relationship is not hinged merely on the “lust” that the man feels for the girl but rather a deep, unaddressed loneliness stemming from the earliest years of his existence. He holds his mother responsible for his sexual excesses – an accusation that does not hold since he behaves in a perfectly restrained manner around his wife and children.
The illusion of loneliness and love that Rejniveld creates through provocative language and imagery is so persuasive that despite the immoral nature of the relationship that the narrator forces on the girl, you still pause to wonder about the events in his life that culminated into something so undesirable. This dangerous thread of thought is snapped sharply when Camillia upon discovering the truth says, “You fucked a child”. A reminder issued in the interest of the narrator as well as the reader. You awake from your reverie.
Does Rejniveld take a chance by following in the controversial footsteps of Lolita, or is My Heavenly Favourite a natural successor to his equally provocative debut novel The Discomfort of Evening? Or is this a work that – much to our uneasiness – is rooted in the author’s personal childhood experiences? It is hard to say. Whatever the reasons for the novel’s genesis might be, it is hard to turn your eyes away as you await the end that has been foreshadowed on the very first page.
My Heavenly Favourite, Lucas Rijneveld, translated from the Dutch by Michele Hutchison, Faber and Faber.
