Book Box: How to build a mountain house
Dear Reader,
These days I am either waiting for electricians or stonemasons or plumbers. Building a house in the mountains sounds romantic I know —but wait until you spend long moments arguing with a wood polish man who insists ebony is chestnut brown.
When the cement work goes awry, I take a deep breath, and think of Peter Mayle doing repairs on a farmhouse in the French countryside in A Year in Provence. Mayle's genius is turning disaster into comedy, his self-deprecating charm making even the most infuriating mishaps feel like part of the adventure. That's the spirit, I tell myself. Someday, this will be a funny story too. Smile - and take all the squelch and snafus in your stride.
Never mind that the wooden beams have been laid in the wrong direction, that the electricity has been gone all day and that the wood polish man is still insisting his shade of ebony is identical to the chestnut brown sample - surely this will make a good story. And surely Peter Mayle endured all this and worse. And after all isn't this the life-in-the-Himalayan-mountains-dream that we city types are forever chasing ?
In the evenings, I return to the little room by the building site, too exhausted to do much else but gaze at the ceiling above me. Are those rafters even symmetrical and why on earth is there a gap between the beams - and why is this trailing black wire tacked on top — my brain refuses to shut down.
Then I open a little novella by Italian writer Vincenzo Latronico, aptly entitled Perfection. I mean to escape into a book that will soothe me - instead I find one that holds up a mirror to me.
Shortlisted for this year's International Booker Prize, this novella dissects the illusions of aesthetic perfection. It tells the story of Tom and Anna, two designers who live in Berlin - in a light filled art deco apartment with tangled foliage, where plants shelter in the nook of a bay window, complete with a Scandinavian farm chair, and an artfully placed magazine left face-down on the seat.
Theirs is the perfect life, going to art galleries, working on their laptops after lazy lunches in trendy cafes. Their world is beautiful, but it's also a performance, an illusion of a carefully created life. And Latronico's brilliance lies in exposing the fissures beneath this curated existence. Is this what I do too, I wonder ? Do I curate my reality ?
I pick my phone and scroll through the pictures I sent my friends. Each one tells a beautiful story. In one shot from our picnic by a waterfall, my friends are stretched out onto a sunlit rock. In another, their two black dogs are splashing in the green foam flecked water against mountainsides covered with deodar trees. It all looks blissful and idyllic - a far cry from spending all day sweltering in the sun waiting for a stone mason.
The next morning, sunlight floods the room, and for a moment, I consider staging the perfect shot—laptop on a blue blanket, mountains in the background, the illusion of effortless creativity. But Perfection has made me hyper aware of the frames we choose. And of what lies outside the frame of my iPhone.
I look again. And now I see the greasy omelette on a melamine plate, the chaos of half-unpacked boxes, and sneakers gritty with construction debris.
'Reality didn't often live up to the pictures. In the mornings it often would.' says the narrator in Perfection. It's a line that lingers with me. The magic of books like these is how they reflect our own contradictions back at us. Reading Mayle has taught me to laugh at the mess; Latronico teaches me to see beyond the frame. And when this house is finally standing, I'll owe its soul not to the perfect beams, but to the crooked ones—and the books that helped me love them.
And you dear Reader, do you have your own frames? What do you capture and what do you leave out ?
(Sonya Dutta Choudhury is a Mumbai-based journalist and the founder of Sonya's Book Box, a bespoke book service. Each week, she brings you specially curated books to give you an immersive understanding of people and places. If you have any reading recommendations or reading dilemmas, write to her at sonyasbookbox@gmail.com. The views expressed are personal.)
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