Menu #4: Uncomfortable Company

Starter

The Dinner - Herman Koch

Serving Suggestion: Gulp it down with a chablis in hand; you may not have an appetite for much more..

Everything about this novel is uncomfortable. The narrator is paranoid and increasingly unlikeable. Being brought into his ethical stance is both terrifying and nauseating. The action takes place over the course of one meal, building a claustrophobic tension that is only increased by a few revealing flashbacks. Each character offered to the reader as a safe object for their trust is revealed to be even more sinister than the last. It's fantastically intriguing, and you're going to want to rush to the end - partly to solve the mystery, and partly to get it over and done with.

Main Course

The Infatuations - Javier Marias

Serving Suggestion: A hearty drink, a fine cut of meat, and patience.

Like a cheap steak when you're starving, this book begins deliciously, but by the end the same meat that felt melt-in-your-mouth delicious at the start becomes a little harder to swallow.

Javier Marias knows how to construct a beautiful turn of phrase. The problem is, he doesn't know when to stop. The first few chapters (the free sample on Kindle, which tricked me into buying this book) are thoughtful, poetic, and intriguing. There is not much dialogue, and no genuine interaction between the narrator and the seeming protagonists. The eponymous infatuation is subtle, and seductive.

It is once the characters begin to speak that you might find your eyes begin to feel heavy. Dialogue, sometimes real and sometimes imagined, spans pages and pages and is extremely repetitive, not to mention somewhat pretentious. Most frustratingly, the alluring couple who appear to be the captivating focus of the novel are barely heard of after the first few chapters, and the novel is taken over by a much more overdone literary topic: romantic obsession.

The basic philosophy hidden beneath the verbose ramblings of the central characters is interesting, though not interesting enough to fill a whole novel. Therefore this is recommendable only as a philosophy text book, for those earnest and thoughtful minds willing to mill over every variation of the same sentence.

Of course, this could be a problem in the translation from the novel's original Spanish. Perhaps, like the steak, this would be much better in Spain...

Pudding

Before I Go to Sleep - S. J. Watson

Serving Suggestion: Sip slowly on this thriller - it's a little frightening, so just like coffee, don't drink it just before bed! 

S. J. Watson's thriller about a woman with amnesia isn't brilliantly written, but as a holiday novel, it will have you on the edge of your seat. 

The most obvious negative - it just isn't believable. The protagonist Christine's 'one-of-a-kind' memory loss is a lazy device, but perhaps more frustrating for the reader is the handling of Christine's journal. Its incredibly detailed chronology and word-for-word dialogue does not fly as a diary entry, and, 300 pages in, it becomes hard to believe that Christine has time to re-read it every morning. Christine's developing feelings of love also seem unlikely for a protagonist who remembers nothing beyond each new morning; can you really fall in love from a diary description?

However, if you can put your cynicism aside, Watson's story does have enough exciting twists and turns to keep you entertained at the end of the day. Reminiscent of Christopher Nolan's brilliant film Memento, this novel will terrify you with the idea of not being able to remember anything about your life, hammering home the heartstopping question - 'Who can you trust?'

The answer in this novel, it would seem, is no-one.

Bon appetit!

Emma