Herman Koch’s The Dinner

When you write without a genre, as I do, it can be a bit lonely.

You don’t have anyone to look up to or over to. There are no similar people who are doing what you’re doing. I can’t say I write action or romance. I can’t say I do police procedurals or spy thrillers.

To be honest, doing book after book like that would bore me. Seeing a future of one character in one genre would make me close my computer and open a bottle and turn on a TV.

So it’s nice to find someone else doing it. Like Herman Koch.

I read The Dinner which is about two couples having dinner…a whole novel about two couples having dinner. Seriously. There are flashbacks. There are trips to the bathroom and side conversations but that’s the structure.

Yet it’s more compelling than many of the cop dramas that I’ve read which starts out with a gruesome killing followed by us learning about the flawed cop who much overcome…yawn.

So when I finished the dinner, I picked up The Ditch. I’m 25% of the way through and…no genre.

I’m not alone anymore.

Confronting Reality

It’s difficult.

I think that’s why humanity must have invented religion and crazy political theories.

Nothing brings this to the fore than going clothes shopping after a year.

Yes, my neck size is now that. So is my waist.

Shit.

There must be some other reason beside my past choices.

This is where my life is. It must be someone else’s fault. God must have a plan. It must be the fault of some force that a politician can save me from.

That’s it.

None of it is my choice.

Desperate to Fit In

Silly people like to say that people have never been so divided politically. These people are known at historically illiterate.

That being said, I watched The Conformist over the weekend for the first time about a politically divided time in the politically divided 20th century when the world torn itself apart over various -isms.

It’s about one mans desperate need to fit in and what he’ll do just simply not draw attention to himself, to blend it, to conform.

Give it a watch.