Review of The Dinner Party by Viola van de Sandt – A great start | books

toRepetition loves a dinner party. From Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway to more recent offerings like Sarah Gilmartin’s The Dinner Party and Theresa Brower’s Cooking in the Wrong Century, an intimate evening provides the perfect recipe for claustrophobia and choreography into which a novelist can sink his teeth. The preparations are usually unjustifiably stressful, the guest list dynamic and unpredictable, the amount of alcohol obscene – in short, as a device that has all the ingredients for a complete and delicious carnage.

The latest entrant to Come Dine With Me is Viola van de Sandt, whose feature debut The Dinner Party centers on Franca, a shy young woman from the Netherlands tasked with hosting a meal for her English fiancé Andrew and his male colleagues. To make matters even more difficult, it’s the hottest day of the year, the menu is bunny (despite Franca’s vegetarianism) and her sous chef is their often violent pet cat.

Before we get to all of this, the novel begins with the words “Stella says I must write a letter,” adding two more literary devices to the mix. For Stella, she is Franca’s therapist, with whom she now meets regularly to unpack the fallout from that disastrous evening a year ago, while the entire novel is framed as correspondence addressed to the mysterious “Harry.”

Through this letter and these therapy sessions, Franca’s backstory is revealed, from her grief-stricken childhood to her lonely school days in Utrecht, where she first meets Harry and later the handsome Andrew. She quickly convinced herself that none of her problems “would matter if I became part of this beautiful, remarkable man’s life”, so she left university and followed Andrew back to the UK. There she half-heartedly applies for some internships, then spends her days loitering around his Kensington flat drinking and watching Crown rings.

There are echoes here of Natasha Browne’s stunning debut novel The Society, a searing examination of race and class, as well as Olivia Sudjic’s Asylum Path, in which a young Bosnian woman attempts to move beyond her traumatic past by immersing herself in the world of her wealthy British boyfriend. However, class politics were never questioned, while Franca’s ‘otherness’ was rarely commented on. Andrew, at least before the dinner party, seems a bit arrogant but broadly good, while Franca gives no sense of what she’d like to do instead – there are vague references to becoming a writer, though Harry says: “I can’t figure out whether that’s a thing or not.” truly You want, or if that’s what you want He wants I want.”

If the themes and characterization are a little muted (at one point Franca refers to herself as “a nice beige Bernese”), the novel is bolder in its frequent references to the climax of the dinner party, or as Franca says to Stella: “the coronation, the denouement.” […] This is work with a knife. Meanwhile, the party itself is described in extremely visceral prose, from cannellini beans that resemble “fat worms” to rabbits whose “flesh shimmers, and seems to crawl,” everything sour and moldy and rotting in the heat: “The refrigerator is dead: the butter is swimming in its plate, and the milk is curdling. The knife lies on the table.”

It is here that Van de Sandt is at her strongest, with the foul smells, off-kilter textures and “unknown dread” sounding like something out of a horror story. The description of Franca stuffing a cavity is positively grotesque, while over the course of the evening, Franca’s body is slowly torn apart—torn first by vicious cat scratches, then blistered by a dropped cigarette, then violated by a terrible act.

The tension mounts and reaches a bloody climax. By contrast, the present sections see Franca – thanks to her sessions with Stella – slowly moving towards a new sense of calm, finding solace in the mundane pleasure of renovating her one-bedroom apartment in Berlin. The combination can be jarring at times, like two different recipes spliced ​​together, but this stunning debut offers a lot to savor.