About the work
Mein kleines Prachttier is based on Lucas Rijneveld's second novel, published in November 2020 by Atlas Contact in Amsterdam under the title Mijn lieve gunsteling; the German translation by Helga van Beuningen came out with Suhrkamp in 2021. The novel is conceived as the narrator's monologue, with chapters that have no paragraph breaks and sentences running over entire pages. The first stage version was created by Ivo van Hove, who premiered it at Internationaal Theater Amsterdam on 15 January 2023.
Plot
A 49-year-old veterinarian who treats the livestock on a farm in a remote, strictly Protestant village becomes obsessed with the farmer's fourteen-year-old daughter, whose brother has died. He addresses his entire account to the girl herself, glossing over how, during one hot summer, he binds her to him and sexually exploits her. In doing so he presents himself as the one who offers her an escape from the narrowness of village life into a world of fantasy.
Cultural significance
The novel won the Dutch F. Bordewijk Prize in 2021 and in 2022 the De Boon literary prize, awarded for the first time; the German translation was nominated for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize in 2022, and the English version My Heavenly Favourite, translated by Michele Hutchison, received the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction. Reviews point to Nabokov's Lolita, because the abuse is told entirely from the self-righteous perspective of the perpetrator.