Author: Tejas Rao

Brothers & Sisters | The Dutch House, by Ann Patchett

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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

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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.

GloPoWriMo 2020: 29/30

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Oof, penultimate day – and another year will now go by without writing any poetry at all (but a lot of reading, I would hope). Today’s prompt is to write about a pet. I do not have one, but I love pets. I thought this was a great opportunity to write a humorous haiku:

Tamagotchi

I wanted a pet,
So bought something virtual,
It broke in a day.

 

GloPoWriMo 2020: 28/30

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Martha Dickinson Bianchi’s description of her aunt’s cozy room, scented with hyacinths and a crackling stove, warmly recalls the setting decades later. Describe a bedroom from your past in a series of descriptive paragraphs or a poem. It could be your childhood room, your grandmother’s room, a college dormitory or another significant space from your life.

Gosh, today’s prompt is a doozy. So many rooms to pick from.

A-201 

The bedroom was to the left of the hall,
Its door right behind the tiny desk I called my office,
You wouldn’t have considered the possibility that 3 slept in the room,
But for us, it never felt too little.

Straight ahead from the door was the attached bathroom,
A small alleyway to the right led you to the rest,
A large king-sized bed to stretch out your legs,
White cupboards lining the walls to store clothes, books, the very best.

Originally there was a large, Alder Hardwood Table,
Resplendent in the light that hit it,
A Windows 98 Desktop computer rest comfortably there,
“Tell Me Why?” played on the VCR mounted in the right corner top,
On a small black television that I watched from the bed.

Soon, however, my parents wanted me to be independent,
So one summer, when I was in India – a remodelling was done –
The computer table disappeared altogether, the VCR did too,
I came back to find a bunk-bed in its place: capacity – one.

I’ve played cricket in the space between the bed and mine,
Chipped off edges of walls with tennis balls,
I’ve hit my head on the edge of the bed with a towel on my head
(Ruining my kindergarten photo no less),
And hurt myself in that house countless times.

However if I search within myself to find, really
Find the person I am,
It seems to me it all started in that room, because
Today I have a room with a bunk-bed, with cupboards underneath,
I keep my books neatly organized, stacked, yet, food in the room,
I do not eat.

The royal blue on my pin-board matches those old cupboards well,
And the wood in my room is Alder too,
You may leave houses and rooms, it is evident –
But they will never leave you.

GloPoWriMo 2020: 27/30

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Today’s prompt is to write a poetic review.

Curd Rice 

How do I love thee?
Let me count the ways –
I love thee as the perfect palate cleanser
Between courses in a meal,
The ultimate finale to them all.
I love thee as my meal itself,
With tadka, with pomegranate,
Or the simplicity in plain serving,
I love thee on plates,
In bowls,
And from banana leaves,
In English,
In Kannada,
In Tamil, and Hindi – even in tongues I don’t speak,
I love thee across continents,
Europe, the Americas, and
Africa too
I’ll find you to in Antarctica if I had to,
Mosaranna, I love you.

GloPoWriMo 2020: 26/30

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I don’t quite enjoy today’s almanac questionnaire prompt. I’m also in the mood to write haiku, so that’s what I’m going to do. Since I recorded a piano cover of “You’ll Be Back” from Hamilton: An American Musical (see here), this was the only thing that felt appropriate.

King George III

My loyal, royal
Subjects will be back to see
They belong to me.

 

GloPoWriMo 2020: 25/30

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It’s difficult to put a prompt like today’s into words, so here’s the hyperlink to the original. As is the case with most poems that ask me to do more than one thing, I find it easiest to try to incorporate as many as I can without taking too much stress.

10 Seconds

In a ten-second span a lot goes through my head,
Its’ incredible to me how I can sway from joy to
Angst, to sadness, to
Dread,
Yet what I admire is the tenacity of the brain – to
Find the small spots of yellow in a
Palette that can sometimes feel grey.

 

GloPoWriMo 2020: 23/30

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It’s a little sad that’s we’re down to our final week of GloPoWriMo already. Another 7 poems and we’re done for the year. Today’s optional prompt asks me to write a poem springboarding from the shape of a letter in the alphabet.

P

Like a proud windsock,
Or a hoisted flag,
A cutlass, unangled,
A scimitar with a handle,
Portable paper fans,
All of these represent the letter P,
Initially just a box in Hieroglyphy.

Vacuum Cleaners

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The first house I properly remember living in is a perfectly-sized apartment for a young one and two adults. It’s the house I remember having my first sleepovers in, where we folded out the green sofa we had and my friends and I slept there. It’s where I remember spilling milk on the wall because I accidentally knocked down an entire glass with my right hand, and it’s where I first remember eating my mother’s pizzas. Aside from these memories and more, including a bunk-bed surprise, my first tryst with a vacuum cleaner comes in this house.

We had a vacuum cleaner at all of the houses we lived in when I was younger. Now I’m not sure what brand it was – and whether we had only one vacuum for all those years or not, but I’ll explain whatever I remember of it. Memory is a fabulous thing, but it’s likely that the vacuum cleaner I describe is a blend of two vacuum cleaners we had. The only things I’m certain of is that it was either a Hoover or an Aftron, and it was either red, or silver.

The rest is honestly a whirr. Quite literally, a whirr – the most powerful whirr you’ve heard. Biswa has this lovely segment on the irritating sound that motorbikes make, and my vacuum cleaner hit that frequency and more. It was not possible to live in peace in that household when the vacuum cleaner was on. The size of the house made everything echo so you heard the vacuum whirring about 4 times for 1 whirr. While we moved across the corridor to a new house, I think that was the thing I was looking forward to the most – the fact that there was an extended passageway and multiple rooms made it almost certain that in the hall, the television would be protected from the vacuum cleaner’s engine.

That was not to be.

I disagree with this Physics principle on emotional grounds, but I learned that sound travels fastest in solids. Never was that more true than when one wall separated me from the vacuum cleaner. I was in the hall, watching television, eating food, while the house-help that assisted us with maintenance vacuumed the rooms. But the sound traveled through the walls and pierced my ears like nothing else.

I knew I would love living in India when we moved here and didn’t have a vacuum cleaner. The jadu did all the jadoo and swept away all sound. For years, I lived in silence, yet a clean surrounding at all points. Till I went to live in France for 6 weeks. The vacuum returned, and with it, all the trauma of my childhood. I was really grateful for a small house and a roommate, because I had to vacuum only half the time, and I could stay outside and far away from the sound when vacuuming was being done, but oh man – on the days I vacuumed, how I wished that these things made less sound.

I thought my saga with the vacuum cleaner had come to a close. Till this lockdown happened and I was home alone. Remember how I said we didn’t have a vacuum? Turns out, our vacuum was in hiding all along. My parents told me where it was to make my life easier, and the convenience of everything has made me love cleaning up the house and doing the chores every day. Vacuuming is a joy because you can see dirt disappear. Dust vanishes before your eyes revealing smooth surfaces. I am no longer scared to make a mess because I can vacuum it away.

I’ve learned how to deal with the sound. My solution so far has been to vacuum quick. It’s worked. My ears can tolerate short bursts of this (and the mixer), so I try not to expose myself to it for too much time on any given day.

However, I’ve made another discovery about the vacuum cleaner, a discovery that has changed my life – and is the sole reason I wrote this post.

You see, my assumption about the vacuum cleaner is that it sucked dust up into the unknown; a void where all dust disappeared never to be seen again. This morning, after finishing up my vacuuming I noticed the vacuum felt considerably more heavy than it did at the start of the month. Then I noticed some flaps. Naturally, I opened them. Lo and behold, the vacuum had an interior!

First, I examined the source of my pain, the vacuum’s motor. After which I found the vacuum’s dust bag where I saw a collection of all the dust and hair the vacuum had sucked up over the past month. I gagged.

Turns out, dust isn’t decimated by the vacuum cleaner. It’s collected and stored for us to clean out. For it’s convenience this machine really sucks, I must say. First it makes that horrible sound, then I have to see and clean the dust it collects? We need a vacuum cleaner that instantly burns all the dust it collects and leaves ash or something. Some technology advancements are owed to society after this medical crisis blows over.

That’s been my adventure of the day.

GloPoWriMo 2020: 22/30

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Today’s poem asks me to use a saying from a language other than English, and make that the starting. I picked “The pillow is the best adviser”, a saying in Swedish.

Sleep

When confronted with the unpleasant,
The difficult, the disenchanting,
I put my head on my pillow, and close my eyes, and
Try to drift off for a while,
Amidst tears, and even when I’m upset, I hope
Pray, that I’ll wake up wiser,
Particularly since the pillow is the best adviser.