A Recipe for Murder: The Dinner (Herman Koch, trans. from Dutch by Sam Garrett)
You must be wondering by now what's with the long exposition (read obsession) with Valentine's day and almost expect the review of a romantic mush filled book that will warm the cockles of your heart. Well you are almost right, except it also carries within itself the headier mixture of murder, cover-up and all those things that make love such an interesting emotion to read.
To be truthful I picked up Herman Koch's The Dinner: How Far Would You Go To Protect the Ones You Love clearly not for its title as you can see the title is a lesson to all budding writers about how not to title their works (In Koch's defense, it is after all a translated title), but for the blurb at the back which reminded me of another novel by Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin. Well since I have been told that I tend to gloss over the story too much, here is a small summary. The Dinner traces the events of one dinner party where two couples Paul and Claire, and Serge and Babette meet at an uptown restaurant to have dinner and discuss the future of their children. Now as anyone will tell you, to sustain a whole 309 pages book on one dinner party makes you either as talented as Virginia Woolf or as stupid as everyone who ever fancied themselves to be writing like her (read almost all literature students). So, at its onset the story makes you interested as you launch into the story wryly looking for slip-ups. However, the story hardly allows you such leisure as it sort of clutches at you like a dying man spitting out his heart's secrets to you as he knows you can no longer harm him.
Early on in the story we are told that Paul and Serge are brothers who don't share a very amicable relationship, mainly because of Paul's distaste for Serge's pompous nature as well as his political career. Serge is a candidate for the Presidential elections and clearly the more overbearing presence in the relationship. The story is divided into five sections, conducive with the way all dinners proceed: Aperitif, Appetizers, Main Course, Desserts and Digestif. Each of the sections reveal a bit more about the characters and we realize that each of the characters carry a burden of truth that they are trying to hide from the other in the name of "love". By the point where it is time for the Main course, the appearances of goodwill wear thin and we realize that this is not a simple dinner party with irritating relatives that many of us are subjected to regularly in the name of , yes you are right, being "nice" and that it is rather an inquisition after the grand apocalyptic event that now threatens to break apart all shreds of familiarity and complacency of both these families, the event of murder.
There is a beautiful line in the novel which sums up the point of the novel according to me, "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way". It is an interpolation from Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and like all great literature becomes the perfect springboard for the condition of the characters in this novel. The novel is an exploration into love. It looks into various sorts of love, ones which are easy to define while others whose very definitions become emblematic of unanswered questions. We have the relationship between Serge and Paul, one the overbearing and self-centered elder brother who hides behind the veneer of protective love and the other who is equally hypocritical in his representation of what love should manifest itself as but believing himself not to be so. As the story progresses we are made privy to the fact that Claire was suffering from a disease that Paul refuses to name as to him naming the disease would become synonymous to labeling his wife's identity as only that disease, however, he has no problems labeling everyone else in the novel within the constrictive identities of be it the brother, son or someone as unimportant as the restaurant manager. The younger characters like Rick (Serge's son) , Beau (Serge's adopted son) and Michel (Paul's son) are very sketchily represented and even though they are the ones who are the initiators of the events that engulf both these families and bring them to the precipice of their worlds, they are absurdly under-represented. Does that change our interest in the story? Well for me it did. I would have preferred to know the characters a bit more than what was given to me, maybe for me to feel that sort of allegiance as the other characters feel for them. However, on pondering over it further, it made me realize that maybe it is a deliberate act as this makes us even more dependent on the other characters for the final act of judgement and as they say, do you love them enough to believe them completely?
The Dinner is a provocative novel. It doesn't merely ask us to review what we understand by love, you know the simplistic sappy valedictions which make us feel good about ourselves (and we being a generation obsessed with the self, it shouldn't come as a surprise) but asks us to look beyond these self indulgent covers and realize its darkest and nihilistic tendencies. It is not warm fuzzy and all that we are daily preached, but cold, calculative and often murderous.
Is it as good as the book that propelled me towards it (We Need To Talk About Kevin)? I am not too sure. But it is an interesting read and did make me question love in new ways than what I thought was possible. And isn't that what Valentine's Day and all such days are supposed to do to you?
till the next time
keep it bookish
the bookbug
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