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The Dinner

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The Dinner

By: Herman Koch
Narrated by: Clive Mantle
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Buy for $19.32

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A summer's evening in Amsterdam and two couples meet at a fashionable restaurant. 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 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, and as civility and friendship disintegrates, each couple show just how far they are prepared to go to protect those they love.

©2009 Herman Koch (P)2014 Audible, Inc. Family Life Genre Fiction
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The story was brilliant and the reader was extremely brilliant! I definitely strongly recommend this book.

Exceptional!

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The Dinner is a spectacular book about family and society, among other things as well. This is not a cute book. It's heavy because it's about heavy things, and because it doesn't take heavy things lightly.

I liked the progression from bland dinner table conversation, pigmented with hints of a couple of mysterious incidents (something found in the phone of Paul's teenage son; Paul's sister-in-law arriving for dinner with traces of tears in her eyes), to the unfolding of the drama behind the dinner. The drama that started years before with instances of personal drama and of parenting; the drama that spikes in a horrific incident, then again in discussing it at home, then again at the dinner table.

The fact that this is a Dutch novel is extremely relevant, since Dutch society struggles with a very tolerant front which sometimes comes up to kick itself in the teeth. It is amazing what torments hide behind the blandness of equality and tolerance - not that they always turn violent, but that fear of speaking up against indiscriminate equality becomes oppressive in itself.

"The Dinner" is a painful analysis of society and family, delivered not from a high moral standpoint, but with a subtle understanding of nuances, of small things that make up or break up lives and relationships.

excellent novel, excellent narration

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If you could sum up The Dinner in three words, what would they be?

Tasteful, spicy and bitter!

Who was your favorite character and why?

The wife of the narrator because she is the synthesis of all the other characters.

Any additional comments?

I strongly recommend this book, the story has a very good suspense, nothing is what it seems to be, the setting of a family dinner in a high class restaurant is perfect to dramatize a fantastic satire of our society.

Captivating with a surprising twist at the end!

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I loved the speakers voice and how he made me experience the story.

the story itself is nice and has some unexpected plot twists which I loved. though the book is quite long because of the numerous descriptions.

great intonation, special story.<br />

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Rambles on quite a bit, but toward the very end gets really interesting. Definitely awesome for conveying an unreliable narrator who you can both be annoyed at and at the same time feel sympathy for.

Disturbing twist

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