My heavenly favorite A novel

The unsettling latest from International Booker Prize winner Rijneveld (for The Discomfort of Evening) portrays a middle-aged man's obsession with a farmer's daughter. Kurt, a 49-year-old veterinarian, addresses his narration to the 14-year-old girl, referred to only as his "heavenly favorite," while he is in prison for sexually abusing her. Recollecting their time together, Kurt rationalizes his abuse by claiming he's the first man to see the girl as an adult. The bulk of the narrative dramatizes his abuse of her, which begins when he molests her in a movie theater. He also addresses her struggles with deciding whether she wants to be a boy, and asks: "Who are you now, the bird, the Frog or the otter?" In Kurt's mind, an injured bird symbolizes the loss of the girl's innocence due to menstruation, and the Frog, a reference to a boy with a "handsome face" who'd kissed her, embodies her masculine aspirations. After Kurt dissects an otter in front of her, she takes his knife and castrates the specimen, then holds up its penis bone "like a trophy" and asks him to "dissect" her. What follows can be a little murky, as Kurt questions whether he's dreaming up some of what he remembers, but it's clear that he rapes her, and that she later attempts suicide. Despite the dark subject matter, the novel's unrelenting pace and single-paragraph structure entrance. This striking chronicle of delusion is hard to shake. (Mar.)

A dairy farm, again, provides the mordant backdrop for trauma in Dutch poet Rijneveld's startling second novel exploring loss, escape, and boundaries. An unnamed middle-aged veterinarian recounts his version of the ill-fated relationship he cultivated with a 14-year-old girl with whom he was (and is) enamored. The unnamed idealized girl becomes, in disturbing and violent ways, the focus of his fantasies and actions over the course of the summer of 2005. A complex character, the girl--who refers to herself as Little Bird--is quirky, misunderstood, prone to self-destructive fantasy, seemingly motherless and living in a stultifying household with her brother and father. Her and the veterinarian's relationship--on a complete collision course with the realistic and the appropriate--may be driven by his need to relive or reinvent his own youth, marred by unseemly sexual attention from his mother. Rijneveld (who won the 2020 International Booker Prize for a previous portrait of childhood trauma, The Discomfort of Evening, also translated by Hutchison) delivers the veterinarian's meandering soliloquy in the style of a Beat poem, with hypnotic effect, via page-long sentences and chapter-length paragraphs. Replete with references to pop culture, rock music, and current events, the fantastical account is grounded in real possibility, making it all the more menacing; this ogre is a neighbor, and he doesn't mind being referred to as Kurt (à la Cobain). Worse, he has found a receptive and needy audience, greedy for attention. His catalog of things he fantasizes about doing, and eventually does, to the object of his misdirected longings will evoke trigger warnings and debate from readers who, as scene after scene of predatory behavior unfolds, could be forgiven for feeling assaulted themselves. Nabakov's predator blamed his prey; Rijneveld's seeks to blame love. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.