Month: May 2020

Brothers & Sisters | The Dutch House, by Ann Patchett

Tejas RaoLeave a comment

The Dutch House,
by Ann Patchett,
Published by Harper (2019)
Rating: ***

Introduction

The title of this review stems from this Coldplay song. I discovered this book through the Goodreads algorithm, and later saw this lovely special edition that had been printed which looks stunning (here – look at those pages!), and was tempted to read it. I consumed this in-part through an audiobook, and in-part through the ebook. My overall rating stems from how I felt at the end of the book rather than being representative of individual components of the book itself.

Plot

The book navigates the life of the Conroy family, centering around siblings: Danny and Maeve, who struggle to confront the past and live in the present – returning to their childhood home as observers to figure out everything in their lives. The book begins at Danny’s childhood, with Maeve taking on a motherly role when their biological mother abandons them. It takes us through a tumultuous teenage time, where Danny and Maeve are booted out of the house by their stepmother once their father passes, and how they survive the world.

 The Home As A Character

Patchett does a tremendous job of making The Dutch House, the titular object a character within the book. She exposes the interiors, first allowing Danny to discover the house while growing up, and then allowing the younger stepsiblings to introduce us to more layers to the house when they are left in the care of Danny & Maeve. Maeve recounts everything about the past by using the house as a frame of reference. Not only does that set up context to the time in which events take place, but it takes you through the house’s own ageing process at the same time. The voice and tone of the book always make you remember the house’s presence – and in some sections in particular, it feels like it’s the walls of the house talking.

A Rushed Ending

This was honestly beautiful till I was about 70% in. I loved everything about it. I enjoyed the way the siblings grew up and grew older together, and the kind of challenges Danny was going through in processing his emotions. There was a complexity to both Danny and Maeve that made them feel like real people, and that these were real events happening in everyone’s lives. However, the last 30% really threw me off. The plot was rushed through and felt unbelievable. The changes to their lives felt like they were impossible in real-life, which took away from all of the set-up that Patchett had accomplished in the first half. That was disappointing. It felt, in a sense, that this book would have been more enjoyable had the ending not been as rosy as it ended up being. Especially because the book tries to hint at how we deal with the past as people. I would have genuinely preferred if Danny and Maeve struggled – in one final scene, with the idea that they would not get closure, and learned to live with that.

Conclusion

Read for characters who seem to have hearts of gold, and sibling relationships that seem to mirror what real siblings are actually like.

Taking Pictures

Tejas RaoLeave a comment

I’m not great with photography. Not in terms of it being a hobby, or a profession for me, but in terms of how I respond to requests for photographs, or when people ask me to take photographs generally. I’m usually okay with it, but I rarely take photos of everyday life, or of things I see around me on the day-to-day. Photographs for me, are reserved for trips I go on, or when I meet people I usually don’t meet. Special events, in essence.

This morning, while cleaning the house, I stopped at the wooden cabinet that contains photo-albums from when I was younger – these carefully compiled archives of regular moments of us as a family. I didn’t do anything “special”, I was just a regular baby-child, but my parents had captured every single moment. Or at least it felt that way. Each photo had a neatly-worded caption under it, and it felt like I could point to a photograph and my parents would tell me what transpired on that day in history. Of course, advances in technology have rendered hard-copies of photographs and physical archives a little moot in today’s world, but for that time, wow. It was incredible to look at how much effort went into compiling these, because they would have to put in a request for negatives to be developed into photographs and then select photographs from that pool to figure out which ones made the album.

We’ve got so much technology at our disposal today that I have an archive of most (if not all) photographs I’ve received since 2013, because everything’s just steadily backed up to the cloud. Today, though, after seeing all those images, I was looking back to photographs from University, to see if I could find some I’ve taken of my friends and I. I realized that there was a disproportionately low number of photographs – most of the photos I have from the past 5 years are just to commemorate things I’ve deemed special. Spending the last month in lockdown and recognizing University life’s come to an end, sometimes I wish I had more photos of the mundane. The dirty bathrooms, the dusty hostels from the first days I went back to campus, the room on each day. Just so I could look back on everyday of my life and point to something I wanted to cherish.

This blog makes it easy for me to do that with words, but I think one of the things I want to be doing more is taking more photographs. I was explaining this to my parents today. A large reason why I didn’t take photographs was because I felt they would take away from the experience of living a moment out in first-person, because I’d look through my phone or camera lens to capture it. I prefer, in that I’m more comfortable with words, so it always felt easier to describe the things I’ve seen or done using words. I guess that only conveys some of it though.

Stories are nicer when you can tell them using multimedia, to really engage with people’s senses, so to speak.

For me though, I want to be able to capture every day a little better. So starting today, I’m going to be trying to take a photograph a day. This was an ambition of mine for the newsletter as well, just so I could sneak in my perspective on things. This is just something I want to enjoy though.

I’m not going to “set-up” shots. I don’t think I want to do that as much. I’m just going to take a photo of one thing I find interesting each day. Maybe along the way I’ll learn a little more about photography too.

Let’s see how this experiment pans out.