The ditch

Review by New York Times Review

BEFORE HERMAN KOCH SUCCEEDED as One of Europe's best-selling novelists, he helped to create and starred in "Jiskefet" (Frisian for "garbage can"), a long-running Dutch television series full of absurdist sketches that challenged people's prejudices. In the process, he became a local celebrity, used to being entertained in fancy restaurants, one of which features in his delectably dark novel "The Dinner." Provocation, life in the spotlight and tasty cuisine are also present and accounted for in Koch's spiky new book, "The Ditch." The story is unreliably narrated by Robert Walter, whose job as the mayor of Amsterdam becomes increasingly fraught when he starts to suspect his beloved wife, Sylvia, of having an affair with one of his aldermen. The clever tease is that "ravenhaired" Sylvia (whose name Walter has changed to disguise her true identity) is originally from an unidentified southern country, whose "blazing interior" guidebooks strongly advise against visiting in July and August. As Walter's possibly ungrounded suspicions grow, his sense of himself as a politically correct person gradually erodes, with deeply buried misgivings about his wife and her culture beginning to predominate. "And what if those prejudices suddenly turn against you?" Walter wonders. "How do you react then? As the Dutchman who wants to be tolerant of other peoples and cultures? Or as something a little more in line with the country of origin, with the national character, of the other?" The fact that Walter's case against his wife seems flimsy - he has seen her at a New Year's reception laughing at something the unprepossessing alderman is saying while he touches her elbow - is rather the point of Koch's novel. Walter's constant attempts to puff himself up ("I was on Time magazine's list of the 100 most influential people in the world. As the only mayor, and the only Dutch person too") show this is clearly a deeply insecure man whose easy charisma masks a lack of moral backbone. Walter's constant carping at the state of his city, ranging from its deplorable garbage collection to the ugliness of its "city hall-cum-opera," the Stopera, only serves to underline the lack of progress he has made as mayor. It's surely no coincidence that the alderman Walter suspects of having an affair with his wife is profoundly green and wants to install wind turbines around the capital's perimeter. "If everyone in Holland would turn down the heat by one degree Celsius in the winter," Walter grumbles, "we could save the energy produced by 10,000 wind-turbines." But here's the rub: On this occasion Walter may well have a point. It's the sort of thing that makes Koch such an intriguing writer; his provocations are designed to reveal nothing so much as our own feelings of entitlement. "The Dinner," which was his sixth novel and the first to be translated into English, struck a chord because it showed the lengths parents will go to in order to protect their children, however reprehensible their crimes. His next, "Summer House With Swimming Pool," demonstrated how a good parent under pressure can become a bad one; while his previous novel, "Dear Mr. M," grappled with how tolerance of others - particularly immigrants - can be overtaken by a sense of superiority. Stephen King is a notable fan, tweeting after "Dear Mr. M" was published that those "three novels, taken together, are like a killer EP where every track kicks ass." In "The Ditch," which has been seamlessly rendered into English by his regular translator, Sam Garrett, Koch again seeks to show the fault lines beneath the surface of ostensibly civilized society. Eventually it's Sylvia's turn to be taken aback when she learns that her husband's nonagenarian parents, in spite of their relatively good health, have decided to kill themselves in a joint suicide pact. "Why can't you let life go the way it goes?" she demands of her acquiescent husband. "Why does everything have to be arranged, from cradle to grave? I don't get it, I really don't, you people have lost all touch with reality." Suddenly the "you people" is being used by someone who has become accustomed to its aspersion. Yet now she has reached her own end point of alienation. It's a worrying glimpse of cultural incompatibility that the 65-year-old author confronts us with. But it's also one that he shies away from by tagging on an unearned ending that feels awfully hollow, mainly because Sylvia and the couple's teenage daughter, Diana, never emerge as fully fledged characters. Koch spends so much time teasing the reader with little clues about Sylvia's origins that he forgets to address a crucial matter: What did she see in her husband in the first place? Did she actually fall in love with him when he visited her homeland as a young man? Or did she use him as a chance to escape the life she was living? These are vital questions Koch chooses not to answer. By not allowing us to be party to Sylvia's side of the story, he shows that his interest in the so-called "other" is strictly limited to his literary gamesmanship. The provocations in Koch's novel are designed to reveal our own feelings of entitlement. Tobias grey is a critic and writer in Gloucestershire, England.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 23, 2019]

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Review by Booklist Review

In his second term as mayor of Amsterdam, Robert Walter begins to feel a sense of unease. At a New Year's reception, he sees his attractive foreign-born wife, Sylvia, laughing at something Alderman Maarten Van Hoogstraten says; and when he joins them, the alderman abruptly leaves. Later, at the funeral of the city manager, with Sylvia and Van Hoogstraten sitting on opposite sides of the chapel, Walter looks up from remarks he's making to find them both gone. Suspicions growing about an illicit relationship, Walter becomes particularly attentive to changes in Sylvia's behavior, as habits of hers that he once found reassuring, such as her light snoring, become irritating. At the same time, he learns from his 94-year-old father that he and his mother plan to meet death on their own terms, and his close friend, renowned physicist and astronomer Bernhard Langer, confides about his illness. Tension builds about what popular politician Walter will do regarding his wife, as his heightened awareness causes changes in his own behavior. A compelling exploration by a master stylist of what jealousy and distrust can do even to a solid relationship.--Michele Leber Copyright 2019 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

The mayor of Amsterdam stumbles through a thicket of domestic dramas in the disappointing latest from Koch (Summer House with Swimming Pool). After mayor Robert Walter sees his wife, Sylvia, chatting amiably with an alderman at a New Year's reception, he becomes convinced they are having an affair. Robert goes on to spend many pages ruminating on whether Sylvia is cheating on him and what she and the alderman may or may not say or text to one another. Robert is a pleasant enough narrator, but his refusal to actually do much of anything (other than ponder) gets old quickly. Meanwhile, Robert's nonagenarian parents have decided on elective suicide, the timeline for which keeps shrinking; a reporter confronts Robert with damning evidence of alleged wrongdoing from his past (Robert's reaction is exceedingly hard to believe); and Robert's old friend faces a stark decision about his life. This comes across as a case of a narrator in search of a plot; some passages are real head-scratchers (anyone who has ever wondered about the recent history of Amsterdam's municipal glass recycling program is in for a treat) and the narrative's late tilt into metaphysical matters is ill-advised. Less definitely would have been more; hopefully Koch returns to form next time. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Robert Walter, the mayor of Amsterdam, is happily married to Sylvia (not her real name), who is from an unnamed foreign country. They have one daughter, Diana (also not her real name). At a New Year's party, Robert sees his wife laughing with one of his colleagues and immediately assumes that the two are having an affair. To confirm his suspicions, Robert becomes hypervigilant while trying to maintain a veneer of normalcy. Meanwhile, his 90-year-old parents tell him that they have decided to die by suicide rather than burden him with their inevitable decline, and best friend Bernard reveals that he has a terminal illness and also intends to die by suicide. Then a journalist interviewing Robert claims she's been given a tip that Robert was the perpetrator of a vicious crime in his youth. How much of this is true, and how much is the wild imaginings of an overtaxed mind? Readers will struggle with unanswered questions about the underlying truth even as the impact of emotions that may have run amok is juxtaposed with the possibility that Robert has figured it all out. VERDICT Koch (The Dinner) creates a story open to interpretation that will appeal to readers who enjoy an unresolved mystery.--Joanna Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island Libs., Providence

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

How can the mayor of Amsterdam possibly think of running a city when his wife may be cheating on him and his parents are planning to kill themselves?Robert, the narrator of Koch's fourth novel translated into English (Dear Mr. M, 2016, etc.), is a little obsessed and on edge. A New Year's party brings official chatter about managing soccer fans and the impact of a visit by President Barack Obama, but Robert has his eyes trained on his wife, Sylvia, who he suspects is having an affair with an alderman. On what evidence? Nothing but her laughing as the alderman "had his hand on her elbow and was whispering something in her ear." But paranoia has an easy grip on Robert's dark temperament, as it often does in Koch's fiction; much of the novel turns on Robert's searching his memory for proof of Sylvia's disaffection. And the bleakness metastasizes: Did he hasten the suicide of a staffer caught embezzling? Should he intervene on his parents' plans to soberly kill themselves? ("Not right away," his nonagenarian father tells him. "In September or October. Autumn, a nice time of year for a double funeral.") A Paris trip with Sylvia does nothing to alleviate his anxiety, and he grows determined to "be the mole in my own life"; as the story presses on, threads about mortality, murder, and Robert's past history of alleged violence begin to connect. The connection is an awkward one, though. Koch has crafted a pitch-perfect tone for a man consumed by jealousy, which in part demands some digression and ranting. But longueurs about trash-pickup policies and wind power are distracting, even as they intend to reveal Robert's distractedness, and dampen the impact of the (somewhat) revealing final chapters.A shadowy tale of the power of projection that's swamped by the narrator's rambling nature. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Let me call her Sylvia. That's not her real name--her real name would only confuse things. People make all kinds of assumptions when it comes to names, especially when a name isn't from around here, when they don't have a clue about how to pronounce it, let alone spell it. So let's just say that it's not a Dutch name. My wife is not from Holland. Where she is from is something I'd rather leave up in the air for the time being. Those in our immediate surroundings, of course, know where she's from. And people who read the newspaper and watch the news with any regularity can't really have missed it either. But most people have bad memories. They may have heard it once, then forgotten. Robert Walter? His wife's foreign, right? Yes, that's right, she's from . . . from . . . Come on, help me out here . . . People associate all kinds of things with countries of origin. To each country its own prejudices. It starts as soon as you get to Belgium. Do I need to repeat here the kinds of prejudices we Dutch people have when it comes to Belgians? When it comes to the Germans, the French, the Italians? Go a bit farther east and a bit farther south and the people gradually change color. At first it's only their hair: it gets darker, and finally it turns black altogether. After that, the same process repeats itself, but now with their skin. To the east it turns yellower, to the south it gets blacker and blacker. And it gets hotter. South of Paris, the temperature starts to rise. When the weather's hot, it becomes a lot harder to work. One feels more like sitting in the shade of yonder palm. Even farther south, one stops working altogether. Mostly, one just takes a breather. When our daughter was born, the name "Sylvia" was the second on our list of names. The second on a list of three, the name we would have given her if we hadn't named her Diana. Or to put it differently: if we'd had three daughters instead of only one, they would have been named Diana, Sylvia, and Julia. We also had three names ready for any boys who came along, but I won't list them here. We don't have boys. We also don't have daughters. We have only Diana. It's probably clear to you by now that Diana isn't our daughter's real name either. First of all, for reasons of privacy--she has to be able to live a life of her own, which is hard enough already when a girl has a father like me. But it's no coincidence that all three of those names have three syllables and that they all end in an a. When it came time to choose our daughter's name (her real name), I made a concession. I felt that my wife had a tough enough time of it as it was, in a country not her own. That I shouldn't go burdening her on top of all that with a daughter with a Dutch name. It would be a name from her country. A girl's name she could say out loud each day, a familiar name, a warm sound in the midst of all that harsh gargling and bleak hawking we call the Dutch language. The same goes for my wife's name. In addition to her person, I also fell in love right away with her name. I say it as often as I can--long ago, too, in the middle of the night, all on my lonesome, in the boarding house where I had to spend the night because there was no room for me at her parents'. It's something in the sound of it: somewhere between melting chocolate and a wood fire, in terms of the taste and the aroma. When I don't call her by her first name, I call her "sweetheart"--not in Dutch, no, in Dutch I'd have a hard time getting the word out of my mouth, only ironically at best, as in: But sweetheart, you should have thought about that beforehand. "Sweetheart" in my wife's language, though, sounds precisely the way "sweetheart" should sound. Like the name of a dessert, or more like a hot, sticky beverage that leaves a warm, tingling trail behind as it goes down your throat, but also like the warmth of a blanket someone lays over your shoulders: Come to me now, sweetheart. My wife--Sylvia! Her new name is starting to grow on me--is from a country that shall remain unnamed for the time being. A country about which a lot of preconceived notions exist. Notions both favorable and unfavorable. From "passionate" and "temperamental," it's only a small step to "hot-tempered." A crime passionel (the term says it already) is a crime we tend to situate more readily in the south and east than in northern climes. In some countries, they just happen to lose their tempers more quickly than we do; at first it's only voices shouting in the night, but then suddenly there is the glint of moonlight on a drawn blade. The standard of living is lower there, the discrepancies between rich and poor are immense, stealing is viewed with more sympathy than in our country, but the culprits are viewed with less--they consider themselves lucky if the police get to them before the injured party arrives to settle accounts. I myself am absolutely not free of preconceived notions. In light of my official capacity, though, I'm supposed to be--and I just happen to make a good show of it. In the last few years I've had a cup of tea (or a beer, or something stronger) with every minority group our city has on offer. I've swung along with music not my own, raised a slice of some vague meat dish to my lips--but that doesn't make me free of prejudices. I've always cherished my preconceived notions as something bound up inextricably with my own person. Or, to put it more precisely: without those prejudices, I would have been a different person. That, in the first instance, is how I look at the foreigner: with the naturally suspicious eye of the farmer who sees a stranger entering his yard. Is the stranger coming in peace, or shall I turn the dogs on him? But now something has happened that has thrown everything for a loop, something with my wife. Something that perhaps has more to do with her country of origin, her place of birth, than I care to admit--with her cultural background, I venture cautiously, in order to say nothing of that dubious concept of "national character." At least, not for the time being. I ask myself to what extent I can hold her responsible, and to what extent it might be the fault of her native country. I wonder whether I'm capable of telling the two apart--whether I ever will be capable of that. Whether I would have reacted differently if Sylvia had been just another Dutchwoman. Sometimes a prejudice can serve as a mitigating circumstance, sometimes as a damning one. That's just the way those people are, it's in their blood. What it is precisely that is in their blood, well, everyone can fill that in for themselves: the thievery, the knife fighting, the lying, the wife-beating, the bashing of other population groups that don't belong in their backward village, the cruel games with animals, the religious customs involving the shedding of blood, the intentional mutilation of one's own body, the overabundance of gold teeth, the arranged marriages of sons and daughters; but on the other hand also the food that tastes so much better than it does here, the parties that go on all night, the sense of "we only live once, tomorrow we may die," the music that seems much more stirring, more melancholy, closer to the heart, the men who let their eye fall on a woman and can never be discouraged, the women who want one specific man, only that one, you can see it in their gaze, in the fire in their eyes--but when they catch their husband with another woman they jam a knife between his ribs or cut off his balls while he's asleep. And that's as it should be too, I think to myself, I who try to remain free of prejudices but am not--and never have been either. And what if those prejudices suddenly turn against you? How do you react then? As the Dutchman who wants to be seen as tolerant of other peoples and cultures? Or as something a little more in line with the country of origin, with the national character, of the other? Until now, the two have always been good bedfellows. Night after night I've shared my bed with those preconceived notions. But what if you wake up early one morning to find the sheets beside you cold and unused? It is still dark, through the curtains a crack of light from a streetlamp shines on the turned-back feather bed. What time is it, for God's sake? She should have been home ages ago. You prick up your ears, you hear bare feet padding down the hallway, but it's your daughter, who's now knocking on the bedroom door. "Where's Mama?" she asks. "I don't know," you answer truthfully. Excerpted from The Ditch: A Novel by Herman Koch All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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