Oh, Herman!?!?
After fan-girling over Herman Koch’s The Dinner, I immediately downloaded another of his novels. I didn’t look at reviews, I just rouletted the five that he has that are in English and landed on (or in) The Ditch.
It wasn’t a lucky spin of the wheel if you like plot to resolve with clarity.
If, however, you like wry insight and a jaundiced, contrarian outlook that pokes holes into contemporary culture and some politically correct sacraments, you’ll enjoy this book. The lead character, the sixty-year old mayor of Amsterdam, suspects his wife is having an affair. There’s no proof really, just a husband’s suspicion about the way his wife laughs at another man’s joke.
So he begins to keep an eye on her. We know she’s a foreigner – not Dutch. She’s unaccustomed to their cold, passionless ways. Is she Muslim? Eastern European? Greek? We don’t know, he never tells us. She comes from an earthier part of the world, he says, where things like marriage and adultery are taken more serious that in the progressive Netherlands.
On top of this, he has to deal with an alderman who wants to scar the city with windmills, and a father who wants to euthanize himself and, oh, a physicist best friend who is going to do an experiment that may end the world.
And it all just peters out at the end of the book without an clear resolution.
But alone the way, there are these great bon mots and astute observations that made my grumpy heart smile. Are they worth the trip? I’ll have to say, grudgingly, yes.
