She Surfaced Like a Dynamited Bass

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	• The Maytrees: A Novel Annie Dillard HarperCollins, 2007 - 224 pages average customer review:based on 50 reviews view larger image
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"The Maytrees": An honest book

If you are not afraid to learn some gut-wrenching truths about human nature, be sure to pick up this astounding work by Annie Dillard. Neither men nor women are excused from a dispassionate appraisal of the way we build strong defenses to ensure our survival when disaster overtakes us.

Annie Dillard Rocks

"The Maytrees" kept me mesmorized from beginning to end. It was a "grabber." Annie Dillard is a skilled wordsmith, and this novel was no exception. Her writing just gets better and better. I loved this book, and can't wait for her next endeavor -- she is among the best!

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She Surfaced Like a Dynamited Bass

Believe it or not, this is the description of the book's saint-like protagonist after making love.

What's up with Annie Dillard? Is she out of control, or is the level of her genius such that merely mortal minds (like mine) have trouble comprehending?

Surprising to say, I think it's the latter.

Here's a sampling of other quotations....

* After they married she learned to feel their skin as double-sided.

* His brain lobes seemed to part like clouds over sun.

* Everything he saw was lower than his socks.

* It was this loping shore of mineral silence people meant when they said "the dunes".

* Above the Atlantic's rim she saw a rain's fallstreaks curve.

* She and Petie laughed to flout fate by smashing together, thigmotropic.

* Low tide smelled like green pennies.

* She scoured the sink till the sponge reverted to spicules.

* He witnessed ghost parts and motes on parade disappear.

* Graywacke stones, dirty sea ice, stubby far plane.

* From solid citizens they sublimed to limbless metaphysicians.

* The swale drained the dunes like a vein.

* Sometimes in the middle of their sleep, in the back of the night with the metal wind and stars forcing the room through the window, they woke together as if at a quake.

* Having limited philosophy's objects to certainties, Wittgenstein later realized he broke, in however true a cause, his favorite toy, metaphysics, by forbidding it to enter anywhere interesting.

* Her brain would deliquesce too, and with it all that she had learned topside.

* Once he saw a fireball.

So what is this stuff?

It's an existential love story told in otherworldly language.

I couldn't put it down.

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The Maytrees

Some may find the complex writing style of this book offputting, but for me each line was a testament to the beauty of language that is lost in our now manic, quick paced times. Dillard has crafted a book that makes you read and re-read each and every line so that you mull it over, consider it, toy with it. A sentence may not seem to make sense but it steeps the reader in imagery and helps us to live and feel more completely the existence of our inner/ outer senses and consciousness. It seems difficult to find such a way in every day life.

reviews: 1, 2, 3, page 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

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