‘But we overlay the present onto the past. You know how you can sometimes stumble across a novel and it seems as though it has been written to perfectly match your tastes and moods a six out of five star read. They knew she was coming and the gate must be locked.’ They hurried down the road to lock the gate, the father and his sons together, the wind whipping at their coats. When she left them she killed them all, each in his own way, and now, decades later, they didn’t want her back. The sons, having stuck it out for all those years at home, did not hang garlands on the doorways, kill the sheep, bring forth the wine. The rich man didn’t call for a banquet to celebrate the return of his erstwhile wife. ‘There is no story of the prodigal mother. Told with Ann Patchett’s inimitable blend of humour, rage and heartbreak, The Dutch House is a dark fairy tale and story of a paradise lost of the powerful bonds of place and time that magnetize and repel us for our whole lives. For behind the mystery of their own exile is that of their mother’s: an absence more powerful than any presence they have known. The siblings are drawn back time and again to the place they can never enter, knocking in vain on the locked door of the past. Though they cannot know it, her arrival to the Dutch House sows the seed of the defining loss of Danny and Maeve’s lives.
Then one day their father brings Andrea home.
Life is coherent, played out under the watchful eyes of the house’s former owners in the frames of their oil paintings. Though his father is distant and his mother is absent, Danny has his beloved sister Maeve: Maeve, with her wall of black hair, her wit, her brilliance. Danny Conroy grows up in the Dutch House, a lavish mansion.
0 kommentar(er)
