So you know how everyone was telling you to read Gone Girl last year and they said, “You have to read it. But I can’t really tell you anything about it. Just take my word for it.”
I’ve got another one of those books. The more I tell you about it, the more I’ll ruin it for you.
So I’ll tell you what I can and try my best to keep the experience intact.
The Dinner is by Herman Koch. It was a huge bestseller internationally and is now being released in the US by Hogarth Books.
It begins with a man, Paul, planning to meet another man for dinner. You do not know much about this other man. You do not know why they are meeting. But it’s obvious from the first page that there is something strange and possibly sinister about this meeting.
As chapters pass you learn who the players are and why they’re having dinner. Or at least, you think you do. Because there’s a space between what people talk about and what’s really going on. Fortunately, you have Paul filling in the blanks through flashbacks.
By the end so much has been revealed about these two men and the reasons behind this dinner that it’s hard to imagine you ever knew so little.
Koch’s slow reveals, the way he cuts off chapters in the middle of the action and leaves you constantly shifting from past to present is wonderfully disorienting and yet spellbinding.
Like Gone Girl this is a dark book. It’s not full of violence or serial killers or anything. But it concerns people doing some very bad things, though I won’t say who and I won’t say what.
And that’s it. Don’t read any reviews. Don’t read any summaries. Even the goodreads page for this book reveals far more than you should know. I read it like I read most books, having no idea what I was in for. And it was perfect that way.
Thanks to Hogarth for providing me with an e-galley of this book.
I LOVED this book, too, and you described it so well. I was disappointed to see so many people on GoodReads rating it so low. I thought the slow divulge of information was perfectly creepy.
Shannon recently posted..Advance Review: A Thousand Pardons by Jonathan Dee
People rated this book LOW? I guess that’s not surprising. After all, GONE GIRL had a love/hate reaction and I would expect the same from this book. One of the better uses of slow reveal I’ve seen. I particularly like how little you know in Chapter 1, he just doesn’t do you any favors. It’s awesome.
[...] stack can all be yours! It features last week’s rave review, The Dinner, which is, according to me, as dark and twisty as Gone Girl except it comes with a dose of [...]