The Dinner by Herman Koch Read Free Book Online Page A

ago,’ I added, which in fact was unnecessary; it was just something I felt like saying, it wasn’t aimed at Babette but at my brother. I wanted to let him know that he was running pretty far behind with his masterpieces.
    At that moment an entire bevy of girls in black pinafores arrived with our appetizers, followed by the manager and his pinkie, and we lost track of where we were – until Babette picked up the thread again with her question about whether or not we had already seen it, the new Woody Allen.
    ‘I thought it was a great film,’ Claire said as she dipped a sun-dried tomato in the olive oil on her plate and raised it to her lips. ‘Even Paul liked it. Didn’t you, Paul?’
    Claire does that all the time: draw me into things in a way that I can’t back out. Now the others already knew that I had liked it, and ‘even Paul’ meant something along the lines of ‘even Paul, who usually doesn’t like any film, especially something by Woody Allen’.
    Serge looked at me, a morsel of appetizer still in his mouth, he was chewing on it, but that didn’t stop him from addressing himself to me. ‘A masterpiece, right? No, really, fantastic.’ He went on chewing and then gulped. ‘And that Scarlett Johansson, I wouldn’t kick her out of bed for eating crackers. Good Lord, what a beauty!’
    Hearing your older brother refer to a film you yourself think is pretty good as a ‘masterpiece’ is kind of like having to wear that brother’s old clothes: the hand-me-downs that have become too small for him, but which in your eyes are above all old . My options were limited: admitting that Woody Allen’s film was a masterpiece would be like wriggling into those old clothes, and therefore out of the question; there was no superlative for ‘masterpiece’, so the most I could do was try to prove that Serge hadn’t understood the film, that he considered it a masterpiece for all the wrong reasons, but that would involve a lot of effort; it would be laying it on rather thick for Claire, and probably for Babette as well.
    In fact, there was only one option left, and that was to run Woody Allen’s film into the ground. It wouldn’t be too hard: there were enough weaknesses I could point out, weaknesses that don’t really matter when you like a film but that you can make use of in an emergency, in order to dislike the same film. Claire would raise her eyebrows at first, then hopefully realize what I was doing: that my betrayal of our shared appreciation for the film was in the service of the struggle against spineless, show-offy crap about films in general.
    I reached for my glass of Chablis, intending first to take a thoughtful sip before carrying out this latter strategy, when suddenly I saw another way out. What was it my idiot brother had said, anyway? About Scarlett Johansson? ‘Kick her out of bed for eating crackers … a beauty’ – I didn’t know what Babette thought of that kind of crass macho talk, but Claire always got up on her hind legs when men started on about ‘sweet asses’ and ‘nice tits’. I’d been looking at my brother when he said that about the crackers, and had missed her reaction, but that wasn’t really even necessary.
    Sometimes, recently, I had had the impression that he was starting to lose touch with reality, that he seriously thought the Scarlett Johanssons of this world would like nothing more than to eat crackers in his bed. I suspected him of viewing women in more or less the same way that he viewed food, his daily hot meal in particular. That was how he used to be, and to be honest it’s never really changed.
    ‘I need to eat something,’ Serge says when he’s hungry. He’ll say that when you’re out hiking somewhere in a national park, far from civilization, or driving down the highway, between two exits.
    ‘Sure,’ I say then, ‘but right now we don’t have anything to eat.’
    ‘But I’m hungry right now,’ Serge will say. ‘I need to eat now.’
    There