Dutch house

Dutch house

The new novel by American writer Anne Patchett is reminiscent of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale expanded to the scale of a family epic. The story of the main characters, Danny Conroy and his sister Maeve, spans the entire second half of the twentieth century, and their fates become fatally intertwined with the Dutch House, a mansion in eastern Pennsylvania that once belonged to the bankrupt dynasty of Dutch tycoons, the Vanhoobeiks. The Dutch House itself is not inhabited by ghosts, but everyone who crosses its threshold, in a sense, becomes the ghost of the house – wherever he then goes, wherever he subsequently lives, he carries this image with him everywhere. Danny and Maeve have only this: a father who passed away untimely, a mother who turned into a memory long ago, a stepmother who seemed to have emerged from a nightmare, and an ominous family mansion. And also adult life, which still won’t begin: the curse of childhood, the mark of orphanhood, the impossibility of breaking the bonds once formed. “The Dutch House” is a story about the victory of love over evil. A victory mixed with losses and in many ways not obvious, because ultimately the reader has to figure out for himself whose side he is on and whether there was a villain here. And if there was, who?