The Dinner - Softcover

Koch, Herman

 
9780804190091: The Dinner
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0804190097 ISBN 13: 9780804190091
Verlag: HOGARTH PR, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

<b><i>NEW YORK TIMES</i> BESTSELLER &bull; The darkly suspenseful tale of two families struggling to make the hardest decision of their lives&mdash;all over the course of one meal. Now a major motion picture.</b><br> <br><b>&ldquo;Chilling, nasty, smart, shocking, and unputdownable.&rdquo;&mdash;Gillian Flynn, author of <i>Gone Girl</i></b><br>&#160;<br>It&rsquo;s a summer&rsquo;s evening in Amsterdam, and two couples meet at a fashionable restaurant for dinner. Between mouthfuls of food and over the scrapings of cutlery, the conversation remains a gentle hum of polite discourse. 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.<br>&#160;<br>Each couple has a fifteen-year-old son. The two boys are united by their accountability for a single horrific act&mdash;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, and as civility and friendship disintegrate, each couple shows just how far they are prepared to go to protect those they love.<br>&#160;<br><b>A <i>NEW YORK TIMES</i> NOTABLE BOOK</b><br>&#160;<br>&ldquo;A European <i>Gone Girl</i> . . . A sly psychological thriller.&rdquo;<b>&mdash;<i>The Wall Street Journal</i></b><br> <br>&ldquo;Brilliantly engineered . . . The novel is designed to make you think twice, then thrice, not only about what goes on within its pages, but also the next time indignation rises up, pure and fiery, in your own heart.&rdquo;<b>&mdash;<i>Salon</i></b><br>&#160;<br>&ldquo;You&rsquo;ll eat it up, with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.&rdquo;<b>&mdash;<i>Entertainment Weekly</i></b><br> <br>&ldquo;[Koch] has created a clever, dark confection . . . absorbing and highly readable.&rdquo;<b>&mdash;<i>New York Times Book Review</i><br>&#160;<br></b>&ldquo;Tongue-in-cheek page-turner.&rdquo;<b>&mdash;<i>The Washington Post</i></b><br> <br>&ldquo;[A] deliciously Mr. Ripley-esque drama.&rdquo;<b>&mdash;<i>O: The Oprah Magazine</i></b>

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

<p>HERMAN KOCH is the author of seven novels and three collections of short stories. <i>The Dinner</i>, his sixth novel, has been published in 25 countries, and was the winner of the Publieksprijs Prize in 2009. He currently lives in Amsterdam.</p>

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1<br><br>We were going out to dinner. I won&rsquo;t say which restaurant, because next time it might be full of people who&rsquo;ve come to see whether we&rsquo;re there. Serge made the reservation. He&rsquo;s always the one who arranges it, the reservation. This particular restaurant is one where you have to call three months in advance--or six, or eight, don&rsquo;t ask me. Personally, I&rsquo;d never want to know three months in advance where I&rsquo;m going to eat on any given evening, but apparently some people don&rsquo;t mind. A few centuries from now, when historians want to know what kind of crazies people were at the start of the twenty-first century, all they&rsquo;ll have to do is look at the computer files of the so-called &ldquo;top&rdquo; restaurants. That information is kept on file--I happen to know that. If Mr. L. was prepared to wait three months for a window seat last time, then this time he&rsquo;ll wait for five months for a table beside the men&rsquo;s room--that&rsquo;s what restaurants call &ldquo;customer relations management.&rdquo;<br><br>Serge never reserves a table three months in advance. Serge makes the reservation on the day itself--he says he thinks of it as a sport. You have restaurants that reserve a table for people like Serge Lohman, and this restaurant happens to be one of them. One of many, I should say. It makes you wonder whether there isn&rsquo;t one restaurant in the whole country where they don&rsquo;t go faint right away when they hear the name Serge Lohman on the phone. He doesn&rsquo;t make the call himself, of course; he lets his secretary or one of his assistants do that. &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t worry about it,&rdquo; he told me when I talked to him a few days ago. &ldquo;They know me there; I can get us a table.&rdquo; All I&rsquo;d asked was whether it wasn&rsquo;t a good idea to call, in case they were full, and where we would go if they were. At the other end of the line, I thought I heard something like pity in his voice. I could almost see him shake his head. It was a sport. <br><br>There was one thing I didn&rsquo;t feel like that evening. I didn&rsquo;t feel like being there when the owner or on-duty manager greeted Serge Lohman as though he were an old friend. Like seeing how the waitress would lead him to the nicest table on the side facing the garden, or how Serge would act as though he had it all coming to him--that deep down he was still an ordinary guy, and that was why he felt entirely comfortable among other ordinary people. <br><br>Which was precisely why I&rsquo;d told him we would meet in the restaurant itself and not, as he&rsquo;d suggested, at the cafe around the corner. It was a cafe where a lot of ordinary people went. How Serge Lohman would walk in there like a regular guy, with a grin that said that all those ordinary people should above all go on talking and act as though he wasn&rsquo;t there--I didn&rsquo;t feel like that, either. <br><br><br><br>2<br><br>The restaurant is only a few blocks from our house, so we walked. That also brought us past the cafe where I hadn&rsquo;t wanted to meet Serge. I had my arm around my wife&rsquo;s waist; her hand was tucked somewhere inside my coat. The sign outside the cafe was lit with the warm red-and-white colors of the brand of beer they had on tap. &ldquo;We&rsquo;re too early,&rdquo; I said to my wife. &ldquo;I mean, if we go now, we&rsquo;ll be right on time.&rdquo;<br><br>&ldquo;My wife.&rdquo; I should stop calling her that. Her name is Claire. Her parents named her Marie Claire, but in time Claire didn&rsquo;t feel like sharing her name with a magazine. Sometimes I call her Marie, just to tease her. But I rarely refer to her as &ldquo;my wife&rdquo;--on official occasions sometimes, or in sentences like &ldquo;My wife can&rsquo;t come to the phone right now,&rdquo; or &ldquo;My wife is very sure she asked for a room with a sea view.&rdquo;<br><br>On evenings like this, Claire and I make the most of the moments when it&rsquo;s still just the two of us. Then it&rsquo;s as though everything is still up for grabs, as though the dinner date were only a misunderstanding, as though it&rsquo;s just the two of us out on the town. If I had to give a definition of happiness, it would be this: happiness needs nothing but itself, it doesn&rsquo;t have to be validated. &ldquo;Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way&rdquo; is the opening sentence of Tolstoy&rsquo;s Anna Karenina. All I could hope to add to that is that unhappy families--and within those families, in particular the unhappy husband and wife--can never get by on their own. The more validators, the merrier. Unhappiness loves company. Unhappiness can&rsquo;t stand silence--especially not the uneasy silence that settles in when it is all alone. <br><br>So when the bartender at the cafe put our beers down in front of us, Claire and I smiled at each other in the knowledge that we would soon be spending an entire evening in the company of the Lohmans--in the knowledge that this was the finest moment of that evening, that from here on it would all be downhill. <br><br>I didn&rsquo;t feel like going to the restaurant. I never do. A fixed appointment for the immediate future is the gates of hell; the actual evening is hell itself. It starts in front of the mirror in the morning: what you&rsquo;re going to wear, and whether or not you&rsquo;re going to shave. At times like these, after all, everything is a statement, a pair of torn and stained jeans as much as a neatly ironed shirt. If you don&rsquo;t scrape off the day&rsquo;s stubble, you were too lazy to shave; two days&rsquo; beard immediately makes them wonder whether this is some new look; three days or more is just a step from total dissolution. &ldquo;Are you feeling all right? You&rsquo;re not sick, are you?&rdquo; No matter what you do, you&rsquo;re not free. You shave, but you&rsquo;re not free. Shaving is a statement as well. Apparently you found this evening significant enough to go to the trouble of shaving, you see the others thinking--in fact, shaving already puts you behind 1&ndash;0. <br><br>And then I always have Claire to remind me that this isn&rsquo;t an evening like every other. Claire is smarter than I am. I&rsquo;m not saying that out of some half-baked feminist sentiment or in order to endear women to me. You&rsquo;ll never hear me claim that &ldquo;women in general&rdquo; are smarter than men. Or more sensitive, more intuitive, that they are more &ldquo;in touch with life&rdquo; or any of the other horseshit that, when all is said and done, so-called &ldquo;sensitive&rdquo; men try to peddle more often than women themselves. <br><br>Claire just happens to be smarter than I am; I can honestly say that it took me a while to admit that. During our first years together, I thought she was intelligent, I guess, but intelligent in the usual sense: precisely as intelligent, in fact, as you might expect my wife to be. After all, would I settle for a stupid woman for any longer than a month? In any case, Claire was intelligent enough for me to stay with her even after the first month. And now, almost twenty years later, that hasn&rsquo;t changed. <br><br>So Claire is smarter than I am, but on evenings like this, she still asks my opinion about what she should wear, which earrings, whether to wear her hair up or leave it down. For women, earrings are sort of what shaving is for men: the bigger the earrings,...

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Verlag
HOGARTH PR
Erscheinungsdatum
2017
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0804190097
ISBN 13 
9780804190091
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
320
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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