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Chosen for June by Victoria Hoyle of Eve's Alexadria
I'd never heard of Annie Dillard until I came across their edition of her carefully-formed second novel, The Maytrees, although I know now that she is a highly esteemed nature writer and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize. I approached her work with some trepidation, despite the recommendation from Marilynne Robinson on the dustjacket (an author I like more than a little). Short, slim books always make me nervous; they have so little room for error. Whereas a big fat tome has plenty of opportunities to come good, short books have to nail it from the start. But I needn’t have worried, because it turns out The Maytrees is exquisite. Pick it up and read the Prologue; you’ll see what I mean. It is a novel about time, and language, and love. Set in the weirdly beautiful landscape of Cape Cod in the middle of the twentieth century, it tells the story of the passionate marriage of Toby Maytree and Lou Bigelow, its forging, breaking and final mending. In so doing it endeavours to map the extent of human love, in its many forms, projecting the Maytrees as archetypal figures with whom we share the essentials of existence. The writing is at once intimate, detailed and specific, while also being amorphous, philosophic and mythic.
You can read the full review at http://evesalexandria.typepad.com/eves_alexandria/2007/11/star-gazing.html
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