Book recommendation: The Dinner

I’m halfway through The Dinner, a Dutch novel with some darkly funny yet restrained humor. The protagonist is an unbalanced high-school history teacher fired for reminding students that not all of the victims of wars and other catastrophes will be missed: “I let them do some simple arithmetic. In a group of one hundred people, how many assholes are there? … How many hopeless cases who go on complaining all their lives about the nonexistent injustices they’ve had to suffer. … How many of your classmates would you be pleased not to see return to their desks tomorrow morning?”

The book is written as though it were a realistic non-fiction first-person account and the author is trying to keep some stuff private:

“I don’t feel like going into detail about everything that went wrong at the hospital. I would only like to urgently advise those who attach any value to life–their own, or that of their family and loved ones–to never let themselves be admitted there. That, by the same token, is my dilemma: it’s nobody’s business which hospital Claire [narrator’s wife] was in, but at the same time I want to warn everyone to stay as far away from it as possible.”

[Update: I finished the book. I don’t love it as much anymore after reading the ending, which is too Hollywood for my taste. Still, I admire the author for setting up the characters and for the prose style.]