I highly recommend it for fans of plots that are dark and twisted with rather heinous protagonists. Sam Garrett’s translation is so idiomatically accurate that it appears to have been composed in English. The book is short, tautly written, ironic, innovative, surprising, and very, very dark. And that character turns out to be quite a bit more complex than it appears in the first few chapters. Koch only gradually lets us discover the depth of Paul’s character through Paul’s own words. However, Paul tries mightily to preserve his “happy family.” At the end, we may be sure that if his family is happy, it belies Tolstoy’s adage that all happy families are happy in the same way, because both of these families take “dysfunctional” to a whole new dimension.Įvaluation: Paul is an observant and opinionated narrator. At this point, I must stop to avoid spoilers. After paying obeisance to Anna Karenina’s “happy families” trope, the author reveals that both Lohman families have some significant concerns about their teenage sons. We get to experience the extent of the waiter’s pretentiousness throughout the five-course meal, during which the plot unfolds.Ībout a third of the way into the book, we learn that Paul is Serge’s brother. Paul is appalled by the prices and is particularly irritated by the small size of the portions and by the obsequiousness of the head waiter, whom he calls “the manager.” The novel begins as a nicely crafted parody of the little procedural absurdities associated with fine dining, with only the merest hints of dark events to come. Serge, however, can get a reservation on short notice, much to Paul’s annoyance, because (1) he knows the owner and (2) he is a candidate for prime minister. Paul, the narrator of The Dinner, and his wife go off to a meet Serge Lohman and his wife to dine at a very expensive restaurant in Amsterdam, the kind where most people must wait three to six months for a reservation.

Fortunately I do not feel the need to like the characters of a book to appreciate a good, well-written story.

The dinner by herman koch