Book Review: The Dinner

Do you ever read books without really knowing what they are about?  Just dive right in without having read anything but the title?

That is what I did with The Dinner by Herman Koch.  It was a book I saw recommended within a list of books and I checked it out electronically and dove right in.  It is an interesting way of reading a book and one I might need to start doing more often.  Definitely makes what happens in a book more interesting since you don't have any clue what to expect when you start reading.

I could tell from the table of content that the book was broken down into courses and quickly realized that the events of the book would be taking place over 1 dinner - hence the title.

For those of you who like to know what a book is about before you start reading it, here is the description from amazon.com:

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 show just how far they are prepared to go to protect those they love.

Overall an interesting book that I finished within a couple of days.  It is an international best seller that was translated into English this past year and I can see why it appeals to the masses.

The book doesn't make you question right versus wrong, so much as what would you do to protect your family or more importantly your child.  Does right versus wrong even matter when it is your child's future that is at stake?

I don't see this as a book that people will be talking about at dinner parties  - although many expert reviewers seem to think so.  But none the less I would recommend this book for an interesting read that is well written and will keep your attention till the end.