Newspaper Article

After 'The Dinner', an uncomfortable conversation

2016

Overview

  As the pages turn and the real essence of these individuals is exposed, a cooling effect takes hold, something more wide-angled and depressing than [Herman Koch]'s brattishness first suggests. \"What is it we look for in a book? That someone goes through a process of maturation -- that he achieves insight? But imagine if that process and that insight simply aren't there? Wouldn't that, in fact, be much more like life itself ?\" We can admire Koch for challenging us like this. We don't have to like the questions, however. Mr. M, you see, is a famous author, a person looked up to in society as a man of wisdom and learning. Underneath it all, our narrator reveals, he is not a very nice person when you get inside his head. Those themes of ambiguous victimhood and culpability shine through in M's views on modern-day immigration (\"there are some things that have to be said, because otherwise no one will say them these days\") and the sorry fight that the Dutch Resistance put up to the Nazis during World War II (\"Any German soldier told that he was to be stationed in Holland breathed a sigh of relief\"). Dutch society is weak and pitiful in the eyes of M. Far more serious a character reference, as far as his creeping stalker is concerned, is the fact that M refused to let the truth get in the way of a good yarn. He is accused of bending the findings of his own amateur sleuthing in order to serve the readability of Payback and thus appease a snivelling publishing industry, a book-buying readership of idiots and an insufferable troupe of fellow authors whom he despises for various reasons. The police investigation had never reached a satisfactory conclusion and now M's book is the accepted take on events.

• Publisher: Independent News & Media
• Subject: Koch, Herman