"Literature loves a dinner party. From Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway to more recent offerings such as Sarah Gilmartin's The Dinner Party and Teresa Praauer's Cooking in the Wrong Century, an intimate soiree provides the perfect recipe of claustrophobia and choreography into which a novelist can sink their teeth. The preparations are usually unduly stressful, the guest list dynamic unpredictable, the quantity of alcohol borderline obscene in short, as a device it has all the ingredients for total, delicious carnage."
"The latest entrant to this literary Come Dine With Me is Viola van de Sandt, whose debut The Dinner Party centres on Franca, a shy young woman from the Netherlands tasked with hosting a meal for her English fiance Andrew and his two male colleagues. To make matters more challenging, it is the hottest day of the year, the menu is rabbit (despite Franca's vegetarianism) and her sous chef is their often violent pet cat."
"Before we get to all this, though, the novel begins with the words Stella says I should write a letter, adding two further literary devices into the mix. For Stella is Franca's therapist, with whom she now meets regularly to unpack the repercussions of that disastrous evening a year ago, while the entire novel is framed as a correspondence addressed to the enigmatic Harry."
Franca is a shy woman from the Netherlands who hosts a tense dinner for her English fiancé Andrew and his two male colleagues on the hottest day of the year. Despite being vegetarian she prepares rabbit while coping with an often violent pet cat that interferes as a sous chef. Franca addresses her experiences in a letter to Harry and recounts therapy sessions with Stella, her therapist, to unpack the repercussions of a disastrous evening a year earlier. Her backstory includes grief, lonely student days in Utrecht, meeting Harry and Andrew, dropping out of university, and drifting through life in Andrew's Kensington flat.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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