Mr. Koch confines his story to one fraught restaurant meal, where malice, cruelty, craziness and a deeply European malaise are very much on the menu ... This book has been widely described as both thriller and chiller, but it really is neither. Nor is it much of a cultural parable, though that seems to be part of Mr. Koch’s intent ... Mr. Koch sets forth a personal history for Paul that is full of dangerous flashes of violence and indicates that Michel, his and Claire’s son, is an apple fallen right off the paternal family tree ...the reader may be propelled by sheer voyeurism about the Lohmans’ capacity for ugliness ...The Dinner has been wishfully compared to Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (and enthusiastically endorsed by Ms. Flynn) for its blackhearted deviltry ... Her sneaky spouses were delectable in their evil genius. The Lohmans are indigestible.
It's fast-paced and riveting. Written in cool, detached prose (deftly translated from the Dutch by Sam Garrett), The Dinner is as theatrical and dramatic as a well-crafted play. It's also nasty. It starts off as social satire but shifts gears, and you find yourself in the middle of a horror story ... Paul, the narrator, is a former high-school history teacher who, we are told, has been placed on 'non-active' status ... Gradually we realize that Paul, with his mounting bile and smoldering resentments, is not a reliable narrator. He has a history of violent outbursts and takes medication to control them ... Issues of morality, responsibility and punishment are raised along the way, and a Pinteresque menace lurks under the surface ... In the end, the book sits on the digestion less like an over-indulgent 'fine dining' experience than Chinese food, which, as we all know, leaves you feeling hungry a couple of hours later.
In his new book, The Dinner, Dutch author Herman Koch structures his entire plot around a five-course meal, going from aperitif to digestif ... It's the story of two couples meeting for dinner in a sophisticated Amsterdam restaurant, the type of place where every item on the menu practically comes with a birth certificate, and in very small portions ... Half the pleasure of reading The Dinner is feeling the author's steady hand on the story as secrets are revealed ...the second reason why I so enjoyed this novel. The Dinner is an alarming drama ... Their crime could take place in Nebraska as easily as the Netherlands. But it's their parents' behavior that's even more chilling ... The best part about The Dinner was this tension taking place above the plates. As the meal wore on, I realized I couldn't get up from the table.
The Dinner won't win plaudits from those looking for saintly protagonists, either. It is the story of two brothers, Paul and Serge, and their wives, Claire and Babette, who meet for dinner in a swanky restaurant in Amsterdam ...about the nature of evil, and the extent to which we can blame parents for the misdeeds of their children ... The dinner itself is described in tiresome detail, its various courses presented by a sinister maître d' with an ominously hovering pinkie finger and then analysed at length in Paul's narrative ... The Dinner lacks the weight and finesse of We Need to Talk About Kevin, but it is a well-paced and entertaining novel.
In Dutch author Herman Koch's latest book The Dinner, translated by Sam Garrett, polite conversation in polite company in a polite restaurant is truly secret savagery ...a savagery that lurks beneath even the most mundane of events where that very common surface doesn't smooth the unsavory over but simply masks and amplifies it ... Over the multicourse meal, Paul Lohman, the narrator, provides a blow-by-blow account of the meal in exacting detail ... Again, the language of the dinner table purposefully obfuscates the issue at hand. Perhaps it is a defense mechanism employed in polite company ... Koch seems to know how easy it is to simply apply labels to those that are outside of our polite dinner conversations ... While a little prolonged and puffed out midway, this is a novel with teeth that latches on for a truly savory experience.
The book is a multi-layered — one could say multi-course — excursion into darkness, played out over the course of an evening’s few hours ... Early on there is a sense of discord between the elder Lohman siblings, and indeed the heart of the novel appears to be the relationship between two brothers ... It is not really a social gathering — it seems that the relationship between the siblings is too strained for such a thing — but rather a repast that is to serve ultimately as the background for a serious discussion about the respective children of the two couples ... It’s as if someone has pressed a button and created quiet monsters among us. And it is this quality that makes the book all the more unsettling and disturbing ... a book to be read in a few hours, discussed for days, and remembered, if uneasily, for a lifetime.
Paul, the narrator of this caustic tale, initially appears to be an accomplished man who’s just slightly eccentric and prone to condescension... The mood is mysteriously tense in the opening chapters, as the foursome talk around each other, and Paul’s contempt expands ... The formality of the meal is undone by the parents’ desperate effort to keep a lid on the potential scandal: Sections are primly titled 'Aperitif,' 'Appetizer' and so on, but Koch deliberately sends the narrative off-menu as it becomes clear that Paul’s anxiety is more than just a modest personality tic, and the foursome’s high-toned concerns about justice and egalitarianism collapse into unseemly self-interest ...Koch’s slow revelation of the central crisis is expertly paced, and he’s opened up a serious question of what parents owe their children, and how much of their character is passed on to them.
This chilling novel starts out as a witty look at contemporary manners in the style of Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage before turning into a take-no-prisoners psychological thriller ... At first, the two couples discuss such pleasantries as wine and the new Woody Allen film. But during this five-course dinner, from aperitif to digestif, secrets come out that threaten relations between the two families ...breathtaking twists and turns of the plot, which slowly strips away layers of civility to expose the primal depths of supposedly model citizens, not to mention one character’s past history of mental illness and violence ... Despite a few too-convenient contrivances, this is a cunningly crafted thriller that will never allow you to look at a serviette in the same way again.
