HERMAN KOCH — THE DINNER / THE DITCH

Author photo

If I know I’m going to finish something I’m reading while on a trip I will often not take along another book. The first reason is weight: I like to pack light. The second is that I like to take the finished book and leave it somewhere for someone else to find, which doesn’t make a lot of sense in places where there aren’t a lot of English speakers, but this was in Amsterdam, so there are. Third, to be traveling and to go into English bookstores is a comforting experience, almost always, even if it’s a bland shop, as this one was, it’s just nice to be around familiars, though again, this was a two-night trip, so I wasn’t exactly homesick. Anyway it seemed right to try this novel by Herman Koch, a popular Dutch novelist I hadn’t heard of before. The Dinner hooked the hell outta me. I’m always drawn to stories that unfold in close to real-time. There’s a meanness in the world that the characters deal with in interesting ways. The Ditch follows up on the theme, though it goes outside the Netherlands to do so. I’ll likely read more Koch at some point. An American equivalent might be Chuck Palahniuk, though I think Koch is more disciplined about his prose (probably, hard to tell with a translation barrier). 

Read November 2021