In 1940s Provincetown, on the tip of Cape Cod, poet Toby Maytree falls in love with Lou Bigelow at first sight. His slow courtship gradually wins her over, and so begins a love story that lasts decades. But when a friend comes between them, they must each renegotiate what it means to love.
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In 1940s Provincetown, on the tip of Cape Cod, poet Toby Maytree falls in love with Lou Bigelow at first sight. His slow courtship gradually wins her over, and so begins a love story that lasts decades. But when a friend comes between them, they must each renegotiate what it means to love.
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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
