Dear Mr M by Herman Koch

Mr M is a writer, and he’s being stalked by his neighbour. The stalker, our narrator, really doesn’t like Mr M. He watches the writer with contempt as he slouches through the day. There’s a backstory and a reason for this intense dislike: Mr M’s most successful novel was based on a story he took from our narrator. It’s a story of adolescent sexual power as a girl and a boy, on the cusp of adulthood, kill their history teacher at a cabin in the snow one winter. 

There are layers of stories in here. It’s an examination of the narratives we construct around ourselves, and of the dirty work of the writer who makes money and success out of them. The book is at its best when we leave behind the self-awareness of a writer writing about being a writer (which is rather dull for the reader), and instead get into the well handled power-shift, the menace of events clicking slowly into place. 

At its heart, this is about how writers live off people’s lives. It’s an interesting subject, but the self-reflexivity feels clunky, laboured, and self-important. The plot is too slow; the prose lacks energy. And it’s a struggle to maintain interest in a group of characters that are essentially unlikeable. But maybe that’s entirely Koch’s point. Do all writers, he seems to ask, have to be arseholes?  [Galen O'Hanlon]