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Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
The blistering, compulsively readable new novel from Herman Koch, author of the instant New York Time s bestseller The Dinner .
When a medical procedure goes horribly wrong and famous actor Ralph Meier winds up dead, Dr. Marc Schlosser needs to come up with some answers. After all, reputation is everything in this business. Personally, he's not exactly upset that Ralph is gone, but as a high profile doctor to the stars, Marc can't hide from the truth forever.
It all started the previous summer. Marc, his wife, and their two beautiful teenage daughters agreed to spend a week at the Meier's extravagant summer home on the Mediterranean. Joined by Ralph and his striking wife Judith, her mother, and film director Stanley Forbes and his much younger girlfriend, the large group settles in for days of sunshine, wine tasting, and trips to the beach. But when a violent incident disrupts the idyll, darker motivations are revealed, and suddenly no one can be trusted. As the ultimate holiday soon turns into a nightmare, the circumstances surrounding Ralph's later death begin to reveal the disturbing reality behind that summer's tragedy.
Featuring the razor-sharp humor and acute psychological insight that made The Dinner an international phenomenon, Summer House with Swimming Pool is a controversial, thought-provoking novel that showcases Herman Koch at his finest.
Author Notes
Herman Koch was born in Arnhem, Netherlands on September 5, 1953. He is an author and actor. His has written several novels and short story collections including De Voorbijganger, Eten Met Emma, Denken aan Bruce Kennedy, and Summer House with Swimming Pool. The Dinner won the Publieksprijs Prize in 2009. He is an actor for radio, television, and film. He co-created the long-running TV series Jiskefet, which ran from 1990 to 2005.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In Koch's equally devious follow-up to The Dinner, civilization is once again only a thin cover-up for man's baser instincts. This time out, we meet Dr. Marc Schlosser, whose practice includes a new patient, veteran TV and stage actor Ralph Meier. At a party, Marc doesn't like the way Ralph looks at his wife, Caroline. So when Marc and his family are invited to spend part of their vacation at Ralph's summer house (with swimming pool), Marc reluctantly accepts. There, his family mingles with Ralph's family, as well as houseguests Stanley Forbes, a film director, and his much younger girlfriend. The air is rife with sexual tension as Ralph showers too much attention on Marc's underage daughter, Julia, and Marc toys with having an affair with Ralph's wife, Judith. Then tragedy strikes. One year later, through a confluence of events, Ralph is dead and Marc is implicated. Over the course of the novel, the truth about what really happened that summer is revealed. Although Koch, by his own admission, is not a mystery writer, he once again succeeds on that count without ever stinting on literary quality. And though it's a bit too long, make no mistake: very few real-world events will distract readers from finishing this addictive book in one or two sittings. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
In this disquieting novel from Koch (The Dinner, 2013, etc.), sex, celebrity and medical ethics become inextricably tangled as a summer idyll goes nightmarishly wrong. Dr. Marc Schlosser is a Dutch physician to the stars. Creative types seek him out because he'll turn a blind eye to their excesses and is liberal with prescriptions. His cynicism ensures a booming practice until one of his patients, a famous actor named Ralph Meier, winds up dead. Cornered by the authorities and Ralph's furious widow, Judith, Marc looks back to the previous summer, building suspense as he tries to pinpoint when and how everything went so awry. Crucial is his decision to take his wife and beautiful blonde daughters, ages 11 and 13, to stay at Ralph's summer home on the Mediterranean. Judith and the couple's two boys are also there, along with Judith's mother and a leathery film director with a scandalously young girlfriend. Despite the usual group vacation tensionsmarital tiffs and glances that linger where they don't belongsundrenched days are spent frolicking beside the pool. Then Marc's eldest daughter goes missing. In the shocking aftermath, he's left trusting nobody and bent on revenge. There is plenty to unnerve here. Marc seems far from reliable as a narrator, never mind a doctor, and sociopathic instincts underpin his stinging social observations. Larger-than-life Ralph, meanwhile, is a man of such rapacious appetites that even a trip to the beach sees him emerge from the waves brandishing a giant octopus for the grill. He actually licks his lips when he gazes at Marc's wife. Most disturbingly of all, amid distinctly European attitudes to nudity, Koch probes the way in which menincluding those with daughterslook at young girls.A sly psychological thriller lurks within this pitch-dark comedy of manners, yet its ending manages to raise far more questions than it solves. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Just as he did in his bestseller, The Dinner (2013), Dutch novelist Koch tells a sinister tale through the eyes of a questionable narrator. Marc Schlosser is a physician whose reputation as a concerned and thoughtful listener has brought him high-end clientele. One patient is Ralph Meier, an imposing theater actor suffering from terminal cancer. Marc assists him in his suicide in the opening pages and then looks back to share the events leading up to Ralph's death, beginning when Marc and his wife, Carolyn, attend a performance of Ralph's. The actor and his wife, Judith, invite Marc, Carolyn, and their two daughters to spend some time at their summer house with them and their sons. Though Carolyn is put off by the way Ralph looks at her, Marc's attraction to Judith ultimately leads to the Schlossers accepting the Meiers' offer. The decision has devastating repercussions for both families. It's a slow burn, but Koch's deft and nuanced exploration of gender, guilt, and vengeance make his second novel to be translated into English an absorbing read.--Huntley, Kristine Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
PUBLISHED IN ENGLISH last year, "The Dinner," by the Dutch writer Herman Koch, became an international best seller in part by occupying that slender intersection between literary and commercial fiction. Its prose has the direct, undemanding quality of an airport novel, its story the momentum of a page turner. Yet its more literary devices - an elegant structure, with each section titled by course, "Aperitif," "Appetizer" and so on, as a single restaurant dinner progresses; a narrator who seems increasingly unreliable - suggest a greater complexity, an ambition to achieve Higher Things. A literary novel generally offers some or all of the following: psychological acuity, characterization that rises above stereotype, astute social observation (or at least astute observation about something), inventive or powerful use of language, artful use of form. Koch's new novel, "Summer House With Swimming Pool" (translated, like "The Dinner," by Sam Garrett), employs none of these elements. It's straight commercial fiction. Nothing wrong with that. If anyone labeled my own novels "commercial," I'd put that reviewer on my Christmas card list. But even by the standards of commercial fiction - the plot hangs together, at least on its own terms; the pace never flags; the ending delivers a proper payoff - "Summer House" doesn't cut the mustard. With this novel in my carry-on bag, I'd opt for the in-flight entertainment. The Dutch narrator, Dr. Marc Schlosser, is a general practitioner. Marc, his wife, and two pubescent daughters vacation with one of his celebrity patients, Ralph Meier, a barrel-chested, big-ego actor who has rented a summer house for his own family on the Mediterranean. Where on the Mediterranean remains up for grabs. The storytelling is characterized by a curiously evasive, obfuscating vagueness, on points ranging from what country we're in to what sort of violence, later in this holiday, has been done to Marc's 13-year-old daughter, Julia, on the beach. We do know from the start that just over a year after this fateful summer vacation the renowned Ralph Meier is dead. Accused of malpractice, Marc is being held responsible, and he gives us every cheerful indication that he has indeed hastened if not occasioned the man's demise. So the mysteries are two: Why might Marc collude in the death of his own patient? And, once the text finally stops avoiding the R-word, who raped Julia? The second mystery might have been cleared up had just one of the characters, not least the girl's doctor father, suggested heading to a hospital or to the police for a semen swab. But no. The idea never arises, not even in order to be dismissed on some emotional pretext. After all, the police would have had to speak a particular language. There's a difference between a character whose voice meanders and a novel whose author meanders. The long tortuous passages of free association in "Summer House With Swimming Pool" come across more as authorial. Novels can always take musing detours, but digressions are welcome only when compelling in their own right - which Marc's reflections on natural gas reserves are not: "I lie awake at night sometimes. I think about the gas bubble. Sometimes it resembles a bubble like the ones you blow with soapsuds, only it's right under the earth's crust; all you have to do is poke a hole in it and it deflates - or blows up in your face. At other times the gas is spread out over a much greater area." I could go on, since Marc does, but let's sample another passage, when he recalls setting off fireworks as a teenager: "I aimed the next rocket at a group of partygoers farther down the street. It was war. You're better off winning a war than losing it. History teaches us that. And biology. You're better off beating someone to death than being beaten to death. From time immemorial, the man has guarded the entrance to the cave. Intruders are sent packing. People. Animals. A persistent intruder can't say later that he hasn't been warned." Um. We were talking about fireworks. Or another evocation of battle: "It's always fascinating, how an illness - an illness like his - attacks the human body. It's a war. The bad cells turn against the good." But cancer as a body at "war" is the weariest of medical clichés. While fans of "The Dinner" were beguiled by its scathing but spot-on observations, if only about the pretensions of haute cuisine, Marc's ramblings aren't biting; they're lame. Koch has a curious habit of employing a cliché, then acknowledging it: "I held his gaze, as they say." Or, "There's no time to lose, every second counts - that's what popped into my mind, and I almost laughed out loud at that line, which seemed more like something from a TV cop show than from life itself - life (my life!) as it was unfolding right now." The conceit, it seems, is that when you acknowledge a cliché (rather than think of something fresher) it's not trite anymore. In her review of "The Dinner" in these pages, Claire Messud discounted the assumption that main characters are obliged to be likable. She was dead right: They simply need to be interesting. Just like the narrator in "The Dinner," Marc Schlosser is an unappealing misanthrope, and Koch goes out of his way to make him distasteful: "Occasionally I'll ask someone to undress behind the screen, but most of the time I don't. Human bodies are horrible enough as it is, even with their clothes on." Yet Messud didn't mean that a disagreeable protagonist is necessarily a plus, or inherently any more sophisticated than the warm and cuddly sort. Characters can be unlikable because they're boring. Marc's unpleasantness isn't arresting or clever. It's plain unpleasantness, the kind you want to flee. One crucial plot device is preposterous. Though Koch is evasive about the exact nature of Ralph's fatal ailment, tagging it "an illness like this" or "such a serious illness," an early reference to "malignant cells" identifies the disease as cancer. When taking a biopsy of a lump on Ralph's thigh, Marc confesses, "I pushed the scalpel in until I reached healthy tissue. By cutting into the healthy tissue I established the connection. The cells from the bump would get into the bloodstream and be disseminated all over the body." Later another doctor upbraids him: "Due to your rigorous incision, the cells most probably entered the bloodstream. From that moment on Mr. Meier didn't stand a ghost of a chance." I relayed this aspect of the plot to a respected oncologist. His reply: "Not at all credible. Surgery of any sort doesn't promote cancer - tumors are taken out, biop sied all the time, without being accelerated." Is Koch taking poetic license? Or is he just being sloppy - especially when the narrator is a doctor? Failing the plausibility test is a black eye in commercial fiction. So is letting the pace become so slack that we don't care who will eventually be revealed as the rapist. A good psychological thriller ought to end with a crisp, clean twist. This ending is mashed potatoes. Herman Koch does have a knack for generating narrative thrust, which "Summer House With Swimming Pool" manifests for its first two-thirds. Nevertheless, given how well his previous novel performed, this follow-up is inexplicably careless. LIONEL SHRIVER'S most recent novel is "Big Brother."
Library Journal Review
Filled with unlikable characters and told by a narrator who seems none too trustworthy, Koch's second book to be published in America is in the same vein as the previous novel, The Dinner. In this new work, Ralph Meier, a famous actor, is dead, and his doctor Marc Schlosser may be at fault. Schlosser, the narrator of the novel, has a personal history with Meier and his family, a history full of sex, misogyny, and, ultimately, terrible violence. Actor Peter Berkrot perfectly captures Schlosser's malicious and self-centered humor in a fine performance. As with The Dinner, this novel is being touted by some as a summertime thriller. It is closer, however, to a horror story, one that will not be to everyone's taste. This is not the horror of monsters and demons; instead, the "things" we need to be most afraid of are the people around us. Verdict Recommended to fans of unsettling literary fiction. ["Koch continues to illuminate ways in which our Freudian unconscious takes dreadful revenge on the ego, often disproportionate to the perceived slight," read the starred review of the Hogarth: Crown hc, LJ 5/11/14.]-Wendy Galgan, St. Francis Coll., Brooklyn (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.