163. Summer House with Swimming Pool
Rating: ☆☆☆
Recommended by: Boulder Librarian
Author: Herman Koch
Genre: Fiction, Suspense
387 pages, published January 26, 2011
Reading Format: Audio Book
Summary
When famous actor Ralph Meier winds up dead, the authorities begin to suspect Dr. Marc Schlosser, Ralph’s personal doctor and friend. As the story unfolds, we learn that the real truth is a lot more complex than simple malpractice. Still haunted by his eldest daughter’s rape during his family’s stay at Ralph’s extravagant beachfront summerhouse, one they shared with Ralph’s family, film director Stanley Forbes and Stanley’s younger girlfriend, Emmanuelle, Marc believes that the perpetrator of the rape could be either Ralph or Stanley. Stanley, who is weirdly fixated on Marc’s daughters’ future fashion careers, seems like an obvious suspect. However, Marc’s reasons for wanting Ralph dead become increasingly compelling as events start to unravel.
Quotes
“There are times when you run back through your life, to see whether you can locate the point at which it could still have taken a different turn.”
“You get a stain on your pants. Your favorite pair of pants. You wash them ten times in a row at 160 degrees. You scrub and scour and rub. You bring in the heavy artillery. Bleaches. Abrasive cleaners. But the spot doesn’t go away. If you scrub and scour too long, it will only be replaced by something else. By a stretch of fabric that is thinner and paler. The paler cloth is the memory. The memory of the spot. Now there are two things you can do. You can throw the pants away, or you can walk around for the rest of your life with the memory of the stain. But the paler cloth reminds you of more than just the stain. It also reminds you of when the pants were still clean.”
“Free-ranging single men are like a house that has been empty too long. There must be something fishy about the house, the woman thinks. Up for sale for six months and it’s still vacant.”
“Life as a widow, she thinks, will always be like this. The friends will go on proposing toasts for months (for years!). To her. To their new center of attention. What she doesn’t know yet is that, after a few courtesy calls, it will all be over. The silence that will follow is the same silence that always falls after a life in the shadows.”
“Flippancy. A laughing matter. It’s like with funerals. They are, first and foremost, expected to be fun. There is laughter and drinking and bad language. To keep the whole thing from being too bourgeois. A bourgeois funeral is an artist’s worst nightmare.”
“An overburdened liver sounds different from a healthy one. An overburdened liver groans. It groans and begs. It begs for a day off. A day to deal with the worst of the garbage.”
My Take
Best-selling Dutch author Herman Koch is a unique voice whose writing is a bit unnerving. On the recommendation of a Boulder Librarian (who also recommended Summer House with Swimming Pool) I had previously read The Dinner. While I found that book to be the superior read, Summer House has its captivating moments. Koch takes you inside the warped psyche of Dr. Marc Schlosser. Marc’s take on biology and human relations is sometimes ghoulish and creepy, but it is never boring. If you liked The Dinner, you might want to give Summer House with Swimming Pool a try.
