Seeing the burned out cover design of Herman Koch’s novel The Dinner in a friend’s pictures of their finished summer reads, I was intrigued what a book like that could be about. The description running down the back side only pulled me in further:
“A summer’s evening in Amsterdam and two couples meet at a fashionable restaurant. Between mouthfuls of food and over the delicate scraping of cutlery, the conversations remains a gentle hum of politeness – the banality of work, the triviality of holidays. But the empty words hide a terrible conflict, and with every forced smile and every new course, the knives are being sharpened…”
As an avid weirdo who typically leaps into books blind without reading the backs, I instantly stopped there, short of the whole description. I didn’t want to know anymore; I was hooked.
Yet as I started the book,the pages upon pages of food and the bland tension between two grown brothers, the protagonist being one of them, faded from interesting to boring, and I started to wonder when the darkness would seep into the conversation.
Just as my interest began to waver, I found that I’d somehow continued reading–another twenty pages, another forty pages. Even as I thought to myself how drab it was, how bland it was to read a grown man prattling about his lack of security in his self image when faced with his brother’s success, I couldn’t put it down. Each time I started to grow distant and my mind wandered, a trickle of this dark secret leaked in.
They mentioned their sons, both the same age of 15. Something had happened with their sons, but what? Another course of dinner goes by with the same trodding slowness, the same reaching boredom, and then just at the edge of losing interest another fact: our protagonist has his son’s phone, he knows something about this dark secret.
In fact, it turns out nearly everyone at the table knows. The only secret is who knows what about it, and little by little, the entire story is unfurled in the final sliver of the book and brings with it such a wave of satisfaction that I’m almost disgusted at myself, knowing the contents of the history they are hiding.
Once the secret is out, the book races to a finish. The finale of the text isn’t in the actual handling of the atrocity at hand, but at the build-up. The entire novel is like a slow, torturous game of avoidance, like ignoring an itch until finally, viciously, bringing your nails to the skin to sate the urge.
My first retort on finishing was that it was boring, yet I devoured the novel in mere hours. I barely looked up between pages, so really it wasn’t boring: it was merely playing at it.