Enduring Love, Quietly, Lyrically, and Exquisitely Celebrated

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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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Sacred Ground

With The Maytrees Annie Dillard has written what is something like scripture for our times. Poetic as any psalm, she traces through Lou Bigelow Maytree a life well lived. For Lou the very dunes she walks over are sacred ground; she never loses faith in people, in love. Who knows what choices one would make in the face of this or that disappointment? Here is a person who makes the kind of choices one hopes one would make in life.
If you've spent any time on Cape Cod you know the characters and scene are truly drawn. However, the language of this book is spectacular: images drawn from philosophy, art, literature. I kept thinking as I read, this beats Rogets Thesaurus all hollow! One feels the need to look up words and references. This novel must be sipped slowly like the finest wine.

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Raintree

Very well written. Posses many thoughts and questions. The characters are real and worthy. It is a story almost by way of prose yet draws you in and keeps you there.

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Across the ages

I've read THE MAYTREES twice since purchasing it. I like the range of the years and what Dillard does with her downeast settings and characters. It is good to see her present such a focused narrative of two or three people, in their life close to the sea.
This is the kind of ruggedness that Dillard fans have come to love in her fiction. I used to write and publish scholarly work on Dillard, and her first novel, THE LIVING figured in the last couple of essays and presentations. It has a broad scope, being a well-crafted assemblage of two or three pieces of magazine fiction together with other material.
In THE MAYTREES missed some of the lyricism of some passages in THE LIVING. And I mark it as a personal preference that I would enjoy more well-crafted dialogue, though Dillard once told me that she didn't like to do dialogue.
I was glad to have THE MAYTREES recommended to me.

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Enduring Love, Quietly, Lyrically, and Exquisitely Celebrated

"The Maytrees" by Annie Dillard is a richly pleasing hybrid--a transcendent mix of a book-length lyrical poem, spare unsentimental love story, and philosophical treatise on the nature of endearing marital love. It is linguistically seductive and unabashedly challenging--a novel to be savored.

I almost stopped reading because I was found myself repeatedly put off by Dillard's use of exquisite rhythmic and lyrical metaphors that I could not understand. She also loves to use antiquated words that I should have looked up in a dictionary but chose not to. Perhaps with a second reading, added by a dictionary, some hidden imagery and meaning will reveal itself. But I continued reading because I soon found myself too engaged in the story and mesmerized by the abundant fresh imagery to stop.

Dillard clearly loves the English language and knows it better and deeper than most. She has a remarkable gift for using it in breathtaking and brazen new ways. I could feel my brain erupting with tiny explosions of glee every time new phrasing, sentence structure, and metaphors made their way from consciousness to imagery within my mind's eye.

Throughout, the work depicts a deep love of place--in this case the tip of Cape Cod, the famous artist's colony of Bohemian writers, musicians, painters, and poets. This is an unyielding, demanding landscape, awash in translucent light and natural beauty. The humans who thrive here--who love this landscape with all their being--are people who must accommodate themselves to its wild and harsh demands. This is the same message that Dillard has for us about the true nature of enduring marital love. It, too, makes wild and harsh demands. If we accommodate ourselves to our beloveds while still being fully true to ourselves, if we allow our beloveds to be fully true to themselves, if we accept our beloveds without judgment or blame, endearing love will follow.

This book is not for everyone. But if you enjoy an intellectual and literary challenge, and already possess mature experience about enduring love, this book will transport you and touch your soul.

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More Than Just a Summer Fling

Although the backdrop of this fine book is on the sandy dunes of Cape Cod, this is not a casual affair for beach reading chick lit lovers. This is a sensuous romance for those who seek the crashing waves of human experience to the lust for shallows who's water soon becomes stagnant. This Steinbeckian-of-sorts novel embraces a cast of coastal dwelling bohemians who despite their simple lifestyle of reading, poetry, and painting find themselves struggling with the intellectual complexities of love, marriage, and relationships. Sometimes these struggles seemed so consuming that life seemingly passes them by, only to find that age put a new spin on the whole endeavor. At times this caused me to become impatient with the characters and was even angered by both their audacity and their naivete which bordered the unrealistic. It was the fine writing that kept me reading rather than the actual storyline. If you are OK with that, then this is a great novel for you. Do know that the story spans quite some time and although much is left unanswered, there is an ending that offers some closure, but still leaves much open for individual interpretation. Perhaps, as the saying goes, the journey is more important than the destination. It did take some time after reading this book to digest it all and draw conclusions. This was not a cheap date. Although it is a short book, one needs a desire to invest some time into it. This book is satisfying to readers who prefer the subtle seduction being provoked with thought and emotion rather than being raped by drama and sensationalism.

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

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