Summer House with Swimming Pool

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Average customer rating 4 (6 comments)

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Herman Koch's laid back yet suspenseful prose is so attractive to me as a reader. All of his characters are brilliantly constructed--complex and questionable--which only adds to the depth of the moral and ethical questions his novels pose. While his books are brilliant and exciting to read, I can understand how they might not be for everyone. However, being able to explore them for days and talk about them for hours is, I think, the sign of a truly great book.

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I trudged through Koch's previous book, "The Dinner", since I had immense trouble with the actions which were the basis for the dinner. After reading this book, I really wonder about the writer's mind. A mind that can write so brilliantly such a despicable tale. Dr. Marc Schlosser is a general practitioner whose contempt for his patients oozes from the page, so much so I had trouble being pulled into the story. I detested Schlosser. Why would I want to read almost 400 pages about this sleeze? The answer is that one of his patients dies and the reader is slowly manipulated into hanging on to find out exactly what the doctor did and then why he did it. It quickly becomes clear that the doctor was seeking retribution, but for what? Not everything in the books or about the doctor is repulsive. The love and affection he has with his family, especially his daughters. He would do anything to protect them. Still, Schlosser does tend to think of himself and his needs and desires first even if no one else in the family goes along with his decisions. The book may have started slowly, but the last half of the book I read in marathon fashion. Hang in until the end and see the just or unjust desserts.

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Like The Dinner, Koch creates a bizarre narrator and a plot that will keep you reading late into the night. Trust me. You will never look at your family doctor the same way. The novel is a prescription for your next book club selection.

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What a book!! First you notice the cover: a physician's prescription pad with the notation "Summer House with Swimming Pool." Intriguing --- but not a fraction of the intrigue you will experience when you begin to read!! Captivating, engrossing, inventive, polished, enthralling --- all of these apply. I can't imagine anyone who isn't spellbound as you first meet the general practitioner, then one-by-one his family and patients. The reader is drawn into a drama that leaves you breathless with its twists and turns, all seen through the eyes of the doctor who is a husband, father, and someone who has a bizarre philosophy of his professional role. Guaranteed to be consumed with the same anticipation you would have to receive an invitation to a summer house with swimming pool.

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After last year’s English translation of Herman Koch’s internationally acclaimed The Dinner, an agonizing story of the anger and violence dragging under the surface at the dinner table, we know to except something searing and intimate from this master of the slow burn. I expected a car crash of a tale from Summer House with Swimming Pool, vehicles flipped and burned, while I’m left staring and braking as I pass by, unable to speed up and get going and leave the wreckage in my rear view. I wasn’t disappointed. Koch seems to choose the most mundane names for these books, which drastically juxtapose with their messy and dark guts: a dinner, a summer house, a swimming pool. Simple things. The books, however, take on the most private and tragic of subjects--those around you turning violent and pedophiliac, nights where too much drink goes from fun to bad to irreparable too quickly, choosing to seek revenge on those who have wronged you or your family, allowing revenge to be taken while you sit back and watch the clock. Summer House with Swimming Pool starts with Dr. Marc Schlosser, general practitioner, revealing to the reader his odd view of his craft and his patients. He seems almost maniacal as he rants of the artists who drink too much and then hide their vices from him, their doctor. He practices medicine with a careless abandon, spending twenty minutes with each patient to ensure they feel attended to while really dismissing most concerns outright. This part of the book, the lead up to the actual meat of the thing, seems to be the weakest, as the Schlosser’s character seems bordering on insanity, unbelievability. But then, we get past Schlosser’s introduction to his private practice as he recounts what can only be called a tragedy, one of those awkward and beautifully rendered modern family portraits executed so startlingly well by Jonathan Franzen and A.M. Homes in the past. Schlosser and his wife and two kids go camping, and meet up with a patient of Schlosser’s. An actor, with a house. A summer house, with a swimming pool. The booze is flowing and from the beginning things are not quite right--motives are unclear, and Schlosser’s wife wants to leave this new gang of friends. As with so many things, enough small warning signs are ignored, enough unusual events made usual, enough heads turned in the wrong direction, that everything is okay until it all has suddenly, horribly spun out of control. Someone is hurt, and revenge is taken. I just can’t say too much about this book without giving something or other away, as this is one of those books that illustrates so well our inability to ever truly know those around us, especially those closest to us. Clear your schedule if you pick this book up--I read it in a day or two, unable to stop until I knew what was truly going on, until I’d followed every paranoid twist and desperate turn to the final conclusion. Summer House with Swimming Pool, just as The Dinner before it, reminds us that every individual has a uniquely intimate private life, swirling with their own motives and fears, their own lies and truths. Koch’s writing deals with, as some of the best writing does, these monstrosities we keep within ourselves or place onto others: the unknowable within us, the rage we hold inside or are unable to hold inside any longer, desires filled or unfulfilled, beliefs rightly or wrongly held. One of the gifts of literature is that we are able to read what other people are thinking, but books like this remind us that we are luckily unable to know what those around us are thinking in everyday life.

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While the first 220 or so pages of this book do have some content that applied to what is to come later, it bored me terribly. After about 220 pages, while I wasn't bored to tears, I still wasn't pleased. Marc, the narrator and main character, is a doctor. He isn't just unlikeable; he's detestable. But his character isn't what makes me dislike this book. It is the author's fault. He didn't stick with the story. Most of the book involves having Marc think about other things. Ho hum. Koch could have at least cleared things up in the second half. Instead,I'm more confused. Why did he bring up so many different points but go nowhere with most of them? What was the point? And maybe most connfusing: the end. I won an ARC of this book from goodreads.com.