The Dinner by Herman Koch
My rating: 3/5 cats
so this is probably a safe bet for people who liked Gone Girl. in other words, not you, richard. but it is not nearly as twisty and satisfying as g.g., methinks.
it has the moral bankruptcy of Gone Girl, the shallow people, banal small talk and heavily-done descriptive elements of American Psycho, and the “we are here to talk about our delinquent kids but it isn’t going to go well” scenario of The God of Carnage. and why yes, i have only seen the film adaptation of The God of Carnage, thank you for asking.
the whole thing takes place over a single dinner, with each section of the book corresponding to a course in the meal. the participants are two couples; a pair of resentful brothers and their wives, and the occasion is not a festive one, but a sit-down to discuss the horrific crime their sons have committed together, whether to tell the authorities, and how this will impact the one’s plans in his campaign for prime minister of the netherlands.
the restaurant itself is a nightmare – the kind of place you have to wait three months for a table (unless you are serge lohman, beloved prime minister-to-be), and they serve you mostly plate and insist on telling you all about the ingredients and from whence they came, and how the little baby calves were petted and loved until they were turned into sweetbreads. so the story becomes this juxtaposition of the violence of their children against the trappings of the entitled bourgeoisie.
(oh, greg is going to be so proud of me)
but it’s an odd little book. maybe it is the translation, but it is very stilted, whose characters seem like when aliens wear human faces, and not just because of how reprehensible some of them are in their little moral cesspool.
the storytelling itself is very skewed – there are amazingly minute details about the food and its cost, but it gleefully glosses over the important stuff. which is coy and intentional, but frustrating for the reader, who really wants to know what psychological disorder our increasingly unreliable narrator suffers from.
as the story goes on, the tension escalates, and with every course, as the waiter’s finger comes closer and closer to the food as he relentlessly describes every element on the plate, you can feel the simmer of the unspoken building to a boil.
there is a lot of violence in this book. there is the crime itself, but there are also numerous flashback stories and memory sequences, where violence is alluded to and then celebrated in ever-increasing swathes of confession. while still doing the coy thing, the discreet turn away from the camera when it comes time to make with some of the details.
ultimately, the book is about protecting family vs doing what is right, but “right” in this case is subjective, and two of our subjects just don’t have the same compass as us; they have a nick-and-amy compass. so things are going to get rough.
it’s perfectly good, it just didn’t make me see stars.
bon appetit!!
