Monday, December 29, 2014

The Dinner

The Dinner - Herman Koch
Category: Book with a meal in the title part 2
2 out of 5 Stars

I'll start by saying I did not like this book or any of the characters in it. The premise sounded promising:  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 conversation 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... Each couple has a fifteen-year-old son. Together, the boys have committed a horrifying act, caught on camera, and their grainy images have been beamed into living rooms across the nation; despite a police manhunt, the boys remain unidentified - by everyone except their parents, but I found one couple flat out crazy and the other pompous and the boys spoiled rich brats. The only reason I will give this 2 stars and not 1 is because I did find the writing style interesting, the way in which Koch laid out the story was very different. 

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