“Bodies are horrible enough as it is, even with their clothes on. I don’t want to see them,
those parts where the sun never shines. Not the folds of fat in which it is always too warm and the bacteria have free rein, not the fungal growths and infections between the toes, beneath the nails, not the fingers that scratch her, the fingers that rub there until it starts to bleed.” Put like that, it’s not surprising that Dr Marc Schlosser has had enough of being in the medical profession. Or, to be more precise, he’s had enough of having to deal with patients. He’s got a highly successful practice but he is bored. Without losing the external patina of care that has brought him a very comfortable lifestyle, he retreats more and more into his private thoughts.
In Summer House with Swimming Pool by Herman Koch, we know the outline of what happens right from the start. Schlosser treated noted actor Ralph Meier 18 months before the book opens, and now Meier is dead. There is to be a Board of Medical Examiners Inquiry. And at the funeral Meier’s widow Judith, in “a voice like a trained Opera Singer”, screams abuse at Schlosser.
One chapter in and we know we are in for the kind of moral debate that has become something of a hallmark for Dutch writer Koch. His previous novel,