The Nine Minute Diner; Grzegorz Kunowski

“The Nine Minute Diner” is a fascinating concept—a novella that focuses on the brief moments before a fatal robbery in a diner from the perspective of the sixteen patrons there at the time. As each person gives their account of events, they explain to the police recorder how the events of their life brought them to that particular diner on that day just before the traumatic events occurred. It’s up to the reader to decide how reliable each narrator is when they both give their account of the crime, and the events of their life up to that moment. While each of the sixteen characters have a distinct personality, not all were necessary as it tended to spread the unifying incident between each character far too thin.

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Sadly, for as intriguing of a concept as this book is and the literary fiction, philosophical tone of the narrative, I did struggle with trying to understand just what the purpose or intent of this story was. Was there some overall message about life choices or perspective? I can’t really say, and that may be because there were just too many characters for the story’s length. You can’t really connect to any of the characters before their narration of the event ends. Some of the characters are more connected to the event that takes place, and to each other, so perhaps if we had just focused on that half of the sixteen characters, the overall message would have been more apparent, and I would have felt something for the characters we’re introduced to. Many of the people we meet are incredibly depressed, but that sad life story wasn’t enough to really intrigue me, either. Having that many characters does serve the point of unreliable narrator well, but it did get a too chaotic at times for me.

You can tell the author worked very hard to infuse philosophy into this short piece of crime fiction, which is great! But unfortunately, some of the turns of phrase used left me scratching my head for the wrong reasons. It could be an issue with translation, but it did take me out of the story. That plus the too heavy reliance on character histories is why I’m giving it 3 stars. However, this novella is an interesting concept, and does do a good job of infusing the philosophy around human agency, where the actual crime is secondary to how these sixteen characters perceive it, and themselves. So, if you’re a fan of literary fiction with a sprinkling of crime and mystery, you may like this novella more than I did. And thanks to the author for providing an ecopy for review!