Word count: 271 words
Reading time: About 1 minute
A great way to improve your writing skills is to emulate the work of others. That’s why, every week, I present a sentence that I’d happily imitate. Today’s comes from Herman Koch.
The novel, The Dinner, by Herman Koch (pictured here) earns 3.5 stars on Amazon. It must be considered a “hot” book because I discovered it via the “fast reads” shelf on my local library, where best-selling books are available for shorter-than-usual loans (one week instead of three) and usurious overdue rates are charged ($1 per day.) Intrigued, I took it out.
Billed as a psychological thriller, the book takes place during one dinner party at a restaurant and the back-story (spoiler alert) — teenage children killing a homeless person — is carefully revealed. I found the structure of the novel manipulative and the characters distasteful. The writing style was quite distinctive, I’m assuming because the book is a translation, originally written in Dutch.
While the book didn’t much appeal to me, I did find a couple of sentences that I liked enough to quote here:
The first thing that struck me about Claire’s plate was its vast emptiness. Of course I’m well aware that, in the better restaurants, quality takes precedence over quantity, but you have voids and then you have voids.
Have you ever eaten in a high end restaurant where the food appears to have been grudgingly served with gold-plated teaspoons? I liked the expression “vast emptiness” to describe that kind of plate. And I enjoyed the matter-of-fact redundancy of “you have voids and then you have voids.”
