The bestselling author of The Dinner takes a critical scalpel to his own work in this metafictional mystery with a twist“What is wrong with wanting to ‘relate’ to a character when reading fiction?” asks Will Eaves in his brilliant recent investigation into the relationship between life and art,The Inevitable Gift Shop. Its an critical question – and one that arises in relation to the work of the Dutch novelist Herman Koch, author of The Dinner and Summer House with Swimming Pool. Koch specialises in stories in which unpleasant and unreliable narrators describe nasty people doing not very kind things. In fairness, or his interest in the unlikable and unrelatable doesnt seem to have done him any harm: The Dinner sold more than a million copies worldwide. Perhaps we are fascinated with his contemptible characters because they remind us of ourselves. “‘I didn’t relate to any of the characters’ means ‘I caught sight of my rage in the mirror’,” suggests Eaves. Perhaps Koch is simply doing what authors have always done: holding up a mirror to nature. In Dear Mr M Koch turns the hoary veteran metaphor into a complex fictional conceit.
The narrator of the novel is stalking Mr M, a famous writer whose most successful book was approximately a young man and his girlfriend who were suspected of the murder of one of their teachers. It soon transpires that the narrator is in fact the young man suspected of the murder, or now older and looking for vengeance. It also turns out that Kochs unreliable narrator this time around is not the narrator of Mr M,but the narrator of Mr M’s book. If you reflect this all sounds a bit meta-meta then you’d be right: for all its pretensions to plot, Dear Mr M consists in large fragment of Koch’s reflections on his own writing practices and procedures.
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Source: theguardian.com