Not P but Life Against Death.......goes out for David Morris

[Mark Kohut]

I belong to a Global Book Club online which 1) Chooses books from a
different country every month and 2) has members from all over the world
(in its small size way) .
I believe in reading books that are not on my preselection kind of list. To
encounter something new I had no idea of.

  Anyway, this month's book is one of the best I have ever read. And it
goes out to David because, although I think the author may never even have
heard of Norman O. Brown [but "they/them" have to be so f'in smart to shape
this work as they did] and *Life Against Death*, seems to have naturally
felt that major thesis in some way and it empowers they/them. Or else they
used Brown or others not seen since...

The novel  is called *The Discomfort of Evening *by Marieke Lucas
Rijneveld, a non-binary person They/Them's first novel. My handle: It is *the
King Lear* of growing up. Yes, it is as bleak as that but magnificently so,
quietly but majestically so.
Grief in a Dutch Reformed dairy farm family in Holland; grief and guilt
caused by death and then encroaching disaster and the bleakest Calvinist
belief system suffocating all life you have ever read about on paper
outside of Cotton Mather.  Grief she [in the book] cannot overcome,
therefore in death's grip and the presentation of the most life-killing
Calvinism since I don't know; Shit [in the form of constipation] and The
Word but No-Money and a poetic language of metaphors and observations while
she struggles just to be....
it is like a kick in the head...like unforgettable.