When I was reading this book, there were drizzles of rain against the window, and a bird with a red and black plumage came and sat on the steel railinWhen I was reading this book, there were drizzles of rain against the window, and a bird with a red and black plumage came and sat on the steel railing, with no clue that I am watching it with pleasure as simple as chewing a freshly bought sweet carrot, or smelling the splattering of spices in oil, or discovering a book with great sentences which would soothe you and make you sleep well every night you spend with it.
Reading Ann Patchett's The Dutch house is composed of such simple pleasures which your brain could collect over years and store carefully in a glass jar of beautiful memories. You go to those memories when you want to taste life, randomly spread in the small corners of your busy routine. You rush back to the warmth of them because it's there, in that memories, you know you lived your life well. And, sentences! What sentences they are!
This is a book about a Dutch house. It's not an ordinary one which you come across every day. Perhaps, most of us would never have been to such a one, let alone live in a one. It's not because we aren't rich enough to afford one or we lack taste, but simply because the house keeps changing hands, passing from one person to another, without ever undergoing any change in its material possessions. The paintings, the curtains, the frescos on the ceilings, the small kitchen and its cutlery, the lawns, the furniture, the pool, and almost everything passes on to each owner of the house, and none of them want to change it. Although each of the owners undergoes extraordinary changes in their lifetime - they lose their sanity, one flies out of the house to serve a faraway country only to land on the wrong side of it and made to beg the streets, other one dies an untimely death, and a brother and a sister are driven out of the house when they had nothing else to hold in life, except each other. And, of course, the house.
Ann Patchett lets the reader view the house by her most vivid narrative. I lived in the house for a while, because Ann Patchett wants us to feel its grandeur in our skin and bones. I visualized Maeve standing before the overhanging painting of hers in the living room so intimately that I felt her tallness near my shoulder. I winced and balked a bit when Maeve talks against her father, for the first time, and says a no to take care of her soon-to-be stepsisters. I did felt bad when the brother and the sister remembered they didn't take their mother's butter box because you could only take so many things when you have to leave your own house forever. Had Ann Patchett written an apple, I could see the fruit, in its glorious shiny red waxy skin, sitting on the white porcelain tray with those ornamental handles of pearls, placed still on the dining table above which one could see the blue golden thread of frescos painted in the high ceilings of the Dutch house. That's what Ann Patchett does to you, to live in the house for a while before she let to feel in your skin and bones how it would be to lose it all in a day. And, you know why the brother and the sister held to the house, spending hours and hours in their car parked before their house. Because you have lived in the house, reader, and you would do the same.
When life throws you in a great tussle, when your fate is tossed in a day, you hold onto something. Sometimes it's a thing from the past, or a memory, or a person, or just the fact the moon and sun rise every single day and you are alive to witness it. To the brother and sister, the house is their shared past, their trauma, their truth, and everything that's to become them. The House and the memory of it; the views they take from their parked car; the hope and the distress that there is life inside the house, and that they are not part of it; the fact that they grow old while the house remains the same, it's the house they lose and gain over years while letting life pass by.
Each character in the story is made or broke by the house except the narrator. He lives to save it only because he was the only one to snap the ties with the house a long time back. The mother, the step-mother, the step-sister, Ms.Fluffy, Maeve (beautiful Meave), the father are all shaped by the house, and their story begins and ends there.
Besides the Dutch house, Ann Patchett placed a slice of the story set in New York City, as if one grandeur could cancel out the other. But, unlike in the Dutch house, where the characters dwarf before the imposing presence of the house, in New York, the city takes a step aside giving more outline to the characters.
Despite the unconvincing ending, the constant struggle of Maeve against her fate, and her almost annoying kindness (she is too kind), the mother who should have never returned but did only to ruin it more, this is great storytelling and a whimsical portrait of emotional bonding. To say I loved it is an understatement. It was as wonderful as watching the black and red plumage bird sit on my window railings, unbeknownst of the fact that it's being observed and that it shall always be associated with simple happiness.
Loading...
