Netherlands: The Dinner by Herman Koch
Synopsis: (from amazon) An internationally bestselling phenomenon: the darkly suspenseful, highly controversial tale of two families struggling to make the hardest decision of their lives — all over the course of one meal.
It’s a summer’s evening in Amsterdam, and two couples meet at a fashionable restaurant for dinner. Between mouthfuls of food and over the polite scrapings of cutlery, the conversation remains a gentle hum of polite discourse — the banality of work, the triviality of the holidays. But behind the empty words, terrible things need to be said, and with every forced smile and every new course, the knives are being sharpened.
Each couple has a fifteen-year-old son. The two boys are united by their accountability for a single horrific act; an act that has triggered a police investigation and shattered the comfortable, insulated worlds of their families. As the dinner reaches its culinary climax, the conversation finally touches on their children. As civility and friendship disintegrate, each couple show just how far they are prepared to go to protect those they love.
Tautly written, incredibly gripping, and told by an unforgettable narrator, The Dinner promises to be the topic of countless dinner party debates. Skewering everything from parenting values to pretentious menus to political convictions, this novel reveals the dark side of genteel society and asks what each of us would do in the face of unimaginable tragedy.
Thoughts: I’ve complained enough about Breaking Bad and how it seems we’re now equating repulsive with depth and interesting. Maybe if I wasn’t tired of the male, jerk protagonist, I’d have more patience for this book. You know where something can be done well, but you’re just so sick of similar things, that’s how I feel about this book – a pop song you loved the first five or six times, but after the thousandth you are so sick of it you want to throw the radio out the window (or just never listen to the radio in the first place as I do with my radio-hatred). I guess unreliable narrator too, I’m just a bit bored with that.
I also didn’t really find the wife Claire believable, but I guess that’s sort of the point: how much of this is real versus in Paul, the narrator’s, mind.
Goodreads has a good convo going about the ending the ending of The Dinner for those interested. Reading through some of the ideas made me appreciate the novel more, but I guess I was expecting the novel to be a lot heavier than I found it.
Rating: 3.5/5
Previous Readings Around the World.