"Brilliant. . . . A shimmering meditation on the ebb and flow of love." -- New York Times "In her elegant, sophisticated prose, Dillard tells a tale of intimacy, loss and extraordinary friendship and maturity against a background of nature in its glorious color and caprice. The Maytrees is an intelligent, exquisite novel." -- The Washington Times Toby Maytree first sees Lou Bigelow on her bicycle in postwar Provincetown, Massachusetts. Her laughter and loveliness catch his breath. Maytree is a Provincetown native ...
Read More
"Brilliant. . . . A shimmering meditation on the ebb and flow of love." -- New York Times "In her elegant, sophisticated prose, Dillard tells a tale of intimacy, loss and extraordinary friendship and maturity against a background of nature in its glorious color and caprice. The Maytrees is an intelligent, exquisite novel." -- The Washington Times Toby Maytree first sees Lou Bigelow on her bicycle in postwar Provincetown, Massachusetts. Her laughter and loveliness catch his breath. Maytree is a Provincetown native, an educated poet of thirty. As he courts Lou, just out of college, her stillness draws him. He hides his serious wooing, and idly shows her his poems. In spare, elegant prose, Dillard traces the Maytrees' decades of loving and longing. They live cheaply among the nonconformist artists and writers that the bare tip of Cape Cod attracts. When their son Petie appears, their innocent Bohemian friend Deary helps care for him. But years later it is Deary who causes the town to talk. In this moving novel, Dillard intimately depicts willed bonds of loyalty, friendship, and abiding love. She presents nature's vastness and nearness. Warm and hopeful, The Maytrees is the surprising capstone of Dillard's original body of work.
Read Less
Add this copy of The Maytrees to cart. $8.98, good condition, Sold by BookHolders rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Gambrills, MD, UNITED STATES, published 2007 by Harper Large Print.
Add this copy of The Maytrees to cart. $12.50, good condition, Sold by ThriftBooks-Baltimore rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Halethorpe, MD, UNITED STATES, published 2007 by Harper Large Print.
Add this copy of The Maytrees to cart. $133.69, new condition, Sold by GridFreed rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from North Las Vegas, NV, UNITED STATES, published 2007 by HarperLuxe.
Dillard has been a favorite for many years. Often elusive and always challenging as a mystic should be, her writing provides moments of startling illumination, "candles struck momentarily in the dark" as Virginia Woolf stated. The Maytrees only adds to her oeuvre, a poetic tale of bonds, loss and overwhelming human passion to overcome individual obsessions with compassion and understanding.
Francesca
Feb 7, 2008
Special taste
I think you must have to have a special taste in order to appreciate this, and I am lacking in that kind of insight. It is more myth than novel, more poetry than narrative. Its characters are stylized rather than naturalistic, and it reminded me of the morality plays I studied in English Lit. It is not at all like her only other novel, The Living, which was long and almost Victorian. The plot involves a love that transcends infidelity; the emotional environment tends to perhaps the 60's. If you are very into Annie Dillard, you might like it, but it is not your usual book
