THE DINNER – Novel by Herman Koch

Born in 1953, Herman Koch it is a Dutch writer and actor, author of novels. When his family moved to Amsterdam. He has written short stories and novelsis, but his best-selling novel (The Dinner), has been translated into 21 languages, and had sold over one million copies throughout Europe. In his subsequent novels, he developed into an ironic writer relating dramas worth telling. His central characters are burdened by their empty existence, they feel unjustly treated. About his novels, you can read: Save Us, Maria Montanelli / War at Last / Eating With Emma / Odessa Star / Thinking About Bruce Kennedy / The Dinner.

Vitruvian Man created by Leonardo da Vinci is a design, where a man in two overlapped positions (with arms and legs spread wide), is inscribed in a circle and a square. https://leonardodavinci.stanford.edu/submissions/clabaugh/history/leonardo.html Throughout the centuries, that image has become a cultural icon. Perfectly proportioned, the symmetry of the human anatomy is correlated with the symmetry of the universe. That man is you, inside your existential experience, where you breathe and see, hear, eat and feel it, also reading a novel: The Dinner.

This novel – The Dinner – is a drama that tells the intimacy of a family, along with disturbing friction between the heart’s needs and those of morality. https://www.amazon.com/Dinner-Herman-Koch/dp/0385346859 The author of the novel leaves us hopeless, describing the decay of the youngest as a mirror of that of adults, who do not want answers, nor do they want to understand. For them just forget, put everything to rest, not talk about it to believe that the fact did not happen. And so the argument hovers like a ghost among the embroidered tablecloths and the courses of haute cuisine, covered with empty conversations about the weather and imminent summer. Here we are in the civilized Netherlands, with well-tended flower beds and environmentally sustainable buildings, where all the kids are blond and beautiful, running, cycling and do not smoke even one cigarette. A story hard, exciting, provocative, with the suspense of a thriller author. Two couples are having dinner at a posh restaurant. Chatting, telling the films that have seen in the past, and also talk about their holiday plans, avoiding to talk about the future of their children. Michael and Rick, they killed a homeless, while withdrawing money from an ATM. In the media world, the ugly gesture is over the net and the four parents are afraid for the future of their children and for them. Security cameras have taken over the events and images were broadcast on television. The two boys have not yet been identified but their arrest seems imminent, because someone has downloaded on the Internet for new movies, extremely incriminating. Two sets of parents for good, while dining at a nice restaurant, it will be able to do to protect their children?