In a novel powered by ambiguity and evasion, nothing is more open to doubt than the intention of the dedication: “FOR YOU”. What initially appears congenial will seem quite equivocal by the end of the book. The entire novel is addressed to a “you” that is a 14-year-old girl whose story is relayed by a self-justifying and deluded 49-year-old vet who is obsessed with her.
In Rijneveld’s previous, International Booker-winning novel, The Discomfort of Evening, a vet behaves in a leering manner towards the 12-year-old girl who is central to the novel, telling her that she is “the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen”. The vet who narrates My Heavenly Favourite is far more than verbally creepy.
But how much can we trust the person who is attempting to explain, if not wholly justify, a manipulative relationship between him and the far-too-young girl? He repeatedly asserts his love for her and the many aspects of her appearance that infatuate him to the extent that his paeans to her become repetitive and tedious. Lolita is evoked with three references to “the fire of my loins” and there is one fleeting nod to Tess of the d’Urbervilles but no mention is made to either novel despite regular references, by both main characters, to work by Beckett, Dahl, Rilke and other writers and lyricists.
There is some very fine writing in this smoothly translated novel and there are many scenes in which the reader is effectively disorientated. This is especially so when dreams mesh with memories of the vet’s abusive mother and fantasies become heightened to the extent that the entire narrative could well be a fever dream of his desires.
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Less useful to any understanding of the girl are reports of her communing with Hitler and Freud, which yields little of purpose. The many identities and chimerical imaginings that are ascribed to her through the narrator’s skewered thinking may be intended to imply her proclivity for strangeness and thus a willingness to break rules. But, however convinced the narrator may be by his narcissistic testimony, we readers still don’t know who “you” is.
