The Dinner by Herman Koch
Published 2009 · 68,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Thriller & Suspense
How hard is The Dinner to read?
The Dinner scores 30 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it relatively accessible. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 25 out of 100
- Urbane, witty vocabulary. Restaurant and political terminology.
- Sentence structure: 25 out of 100
- Abstraction: 30 out of 100
- Concrete dinner setting carrying moral philosophy about privilege and complicity.
- Information density: 35 out of 100
- Compressed. Single evening containing a family's moral disintegration.
- Narrative indirection: 35 out of 100
- Paul withholds information strategically. His unreliability is the novel's structure.
- Symbolic density: 25 out of 100
- The dinner courses as structure. The restaurant as theater of bourgeois hypocrisy.
- Ironic distance: 35 out of 100
- Paul's charm and wit create sustained ironic distance from his own monstrousness.
- Resolution withholding: 32 out of 100
- The crime revealed in stages. Paul's true nature withheld until late.
- Structural complexity: 25 out of 100
- Five-course dinner structure. Real-time frame with embedded flashbacks.
How The Dinner is regarded
The Dinner holds a literary regard score of 38 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.