The Dinner

A Novel

By: Herman Koch, Sam Garrett - translator

Narrated by: Clive Mantle

Length: 8 hrs and 55 mins

Publisher's summary

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The darkly suspenseful tale of two families struggling to make the hardest decision of their lives—all over the course of one meal. Now a major motion picture.

“Chilling, nasty, smart, shocking, and unputdownable.”—Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl

It’s a summer’s evening in Amsterdam, and two couples meet at a fashionable restaurant for dinner. Between mouthfuls of food and over the polite scrapings of cutlery, the conversation remains a gentle hum of polite discourse—the banality of work, the triviality of the holidays. But behind the empty words, terrible things need to be said, and with every forced smile and every new course, the knives are being sharpened. Each couple has a fifteen-year-old son. The two boys are united by their accountability for a single horrific act—an act that has triggered a police investigation and shattered the comfortable, insulated worlds of their families.

As the dinner reaches its culinary climax, the conversation finally touches on their children. As civility and friendship disintegrate, each couple shows just how far they are prepared to go to protect those they love.

Tautly written, incredibly gripping, and told by an unforgettable narrator, The Dinner promises to be the topic of countless dinner party debates. Skewering everything from parenting values to pretentious menus to political convictions, this novel reveals the dark side of genteel society and asks what each of us would do in the face of unimaginable tragedy.

©2009 Herman Koch; Translation © 2012 by Sam Garrett (P)2013 AudioGO

Happy Families Are All Alike

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Thus begins The Dinner, a novel served up in courses. The food is minimalist, overly described, and at times not especially palatable. The same can be said for this little novel where characters we may not like are thrust before us. Just as the spaces on the plates are greater than the bits of food, what's unsaid about our characters is greater than what we are told.
The Dinner is often compared to Gone Girl. Both feature people acting without conscience and narrators whose voices don't quite ring true. Most readers prefer Gone Girl for its strong narrative pacing, but I was dissapointed by GG, while I loved The Dinner. I found the characters here to be much more interesting, and I enjoyed the structure of this novel, where the current action takes place over a few hours, while recollections fill in the story.
The audio narration by Clive Mantle was masterful. One of the best out of the several hundred books I've listened to. This is one where the audio narration elevates a good book to an amazing "reading" experience.

Thought Proving Disturbing Story of Family

oh how i love the unreliable narrator. the narrator who at first, you kind of like, laughing at his jokes, agreeing with his commentary. the narrator you feel compassion for -- his story and opinions. the narrator that throws everything on it's head as the story progresses and makes you feel almost angry at yourself for feeling the way you did in the beginning of the novel. when the truth is actually laid out there and you see what he was saying all along.
clive mantle does a great job with this narration.

this book is DARK. i mean...like....really really dark. in a long while i haven't read anything this shocking. its full of people you won't like...full of scenes you won't ever want to read again (and won't soon forget).

i think the pacing of this novel was really well done. to use a food metaphor (this is "the dinner" after all), the unfolding of each layer of the onion brings out new facts, new understandings, and therefor new questions. there was a perfect amount of the "now" and the "before". a perfect amount of insight, introduced course by course.


***one thing i will say is that this book is NOTHING like Gone Girl. i dont know why so many people are comparing the two. i mean, i've read no less then 5 books in the past year that have so called 'twist' endings...and none of them can be compared to one another. so...if you liked GG, you may not like this...and if you hated GG, you may still love this -- so don't take that comparison as your judge. just read it.***

Loved the twists

"Twists" isn't quite the right word. This book just went in directions I didn't expect it to go and I loved it. It sneaks up on you and before you know it, nothing is what it seems. I really liked this book. It's dark and surprising.

Well Now, Wasn't That Different

I can completely understand readers that have loved this book as much as I did...along with the readers that abandoned this book before finishing or hate it. I completely understand both sides.

This book creeps along in a seemingly typical foreign tale of an uncomfortable dinner then hits on a topics that wouldn't have been considered twenty years ago. Few modern parents would ever wonder, out of the blue, where they personally would stand. Sadly, there are a growing number of parents making them. These hard family and personal decisions made in split seconds. The thought alone makes me shutter and allowed me again to thank God, and my son, that I NEVER came close to a similar decision. Listening to this book was riveting...spellbinding. I couldn't turn it off at times. My brain from couldn’t stop thinking about it when I wasn't able to listen.

The narration is perfection. There were several hysterically funny scenes that brought tears of laughter, along with those of utter shock. The Dinner is the perfect book for a book club or any discussion group that wants a topic where there will be a LOT of discussion.

Unable to keep traction

How would you have changed the story to make it more enjoyable?

The story started out so great, with great foreshadowing; however, around the halfway point it got rather tedious and I found it really hard to care about what was being foreshadowed. The ending was okay, but the payoff I was hoping for was just not there.

A Slow Burn Into Harrowing Territory

Any additional comments?

I ended up liking this one a lot more than I thought I would after the first 25-30 pages.

This begins as a clever but almost precious conceit. A man and his wife go to dinner with his brother and sister-in-law. The brother is an influential Dutch politician, and that means they get special attention at the oh-so-pricey and full-of-itself restaurant they choose.

Even that start is strong. Our narrator has a funny judgmental tone, showing up his brother’s pretensions and critiquing the manners of the restaurant manager and others. It’s a quiet beginning, but the peculiar structure – a novel ordered around the stages of a fine meal – makes it intriguing if not compelling.

Then, gradually, the novel turns harrowing. It becomes, not a light send-up of manners, but a demonstration that much of what seems the bedrock certainty of these people’s lives is false or rotten.

At first we learn, against Tolstoy’s famous phrase, that not “all happy families are alike.” Or rather, we learn that these families are decidedly unhappy, and for reasons that run deeper than seems conceivable. [SPOILER ALERT:] Most strikingly, we learn that the two couples’ children are behind a terrible attack on a homeless person and that one of them the attack and has blackmailed the others with posting his recordings on Youtube.

Then, we see a deeper unraveling not just of family but of the self (as we learn of the narrator’s deep personal unhappiness), of the Dutch character (for what the narrator sees as a cultural inability to reflect on anything of real substance), and possibly even of the myth of Western culture itself. Eventually a sleeping fascism creeps into everything, darkening the lightheartedness of the opening into something painful to experience but compelling to read.

That’s a long list of certainties to undo over the course of a single dinner, but somehow Koch makes it happen. As I say, it began interestingly enough, though I wondered how well its particular cultural concerns would translate. As it gains momentum, though, it turns from a light meal into a hell of a lot to chew on. Miraculously, it does all of that without ever quite losing its surface elegance or even its lightness. This is a deeply skilled writer taking on the deepest of questions. So, yes, it does translate very effectively.

Not sure if I liked this one

Would you consider the audio edition of The Dinner to be better than the print version?

I think Clive did a great job with the story. Pauses at the right time, no silly voices for characters. Love the accent.

Which scene was your favorite?

I can't get the violent scenes from my mind to find one I would call my favorite.

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

There were so many times I was bored with the story. Then confused because he kept going back to past memories. I'm still not sure what the heck happened.

Any additional comments?

Being a mother of only 1 boy, I'm not sure what I would do in their situation.

Insider view of a horrible mind

What did you love best about The Dinner?

I liked the book a lot, but this question would be better posed in the opposite. What did I hate most about the Dinner? What an interesting peek into the deep recesses of the mind of a creep!

Who was your favorite character and why?

Michelle, they only dabbled into the psyche of the boy. All we know is he is a clone of his dad, and his dad is awful.

Did Clive Mantle do a good job differentiating all the characters? How?

I really disliked the narrator for the first 1/2 of the book. I felt he was way too animated. I felt like someone was reading a "Hello Kitty" children's novel to me, and was really annoyed by it. But I got so engrossed in the psyche of the awful people, that at some point it didn't matter anymore.

If you could rename The Dinner, what would you call it?

The Awful People

Dinner out can be very costly.

The interweaving's of courses of a "gourmet" meal with the dark secrets of a political family while looking for a "Happy family" is a unique story. The tale has lots of humour, suspense, and insights into the issues of life in the struggles of prejudice in European countries today.

A good story

It was a little difficult to get into at first, for me there was just s little too much background details to where it got a bit boring but by halfway through I couldn't wait to see what happened next! The narrator, Clive Mantle - I've never heard him before and his voice was soothing, his British accent a delight, and the different times he used for the characters was funny. A good read, I was surprised how it ended.