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The Maytrees
The Maytrees
The Maytrees
Audiobook5 hours

The Maytrees

Written by Annie Dillard

Narrated by David Rasche

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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About this audiobook

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. Hands-off, 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. Lou takes up painting. When their son Pete appears, their innocent Bohemian friend Deary helps care for him. These people are all loving, and ironic. Theirs is a simple and bold story.

In this moving novel, Dillard intimately depicts nature's vastness and nearness. She presents willed bonds of loyalty, friendship, and abiding love. Warm and hopeful, The Maytrees is the surprising capstone of Annie Dillard's original body of work.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherHarperAudio
Release dateJun 12, 2007
ISBN9780061472893
The Maytrees
Author

Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, An American Childhood, The Writing Life, The Living and The Maytrees. She is a member of the Academy of Arts and Letters and has received fellowship grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

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Reviews for The Maytrees

Rating: 3.4809160992366417 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    What is love? This age-old question is probed along with the accompanying themes of shame and grace. Yet this is more than another book about relationships...its a soul-satisfying contemplation of the choices we make in life.And, oh, the writing. I am captivated with Dillard's way with words. It doesn't even matter to me that many of her allusions are beyond my experience. I get completely immersed in her phrasing and wordplay. The setting on Cape Cod with its glimmering sea, sky, and sand dunes is an important part of the book, but this is definitely no beach read! Its a book to revel in and then cherish.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is the first novel by Dillard I have read. It made me want to read more of her works. I liked the flow of her writing and the premise of the story. She manages to make the implausible seem reasonable.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    Widely well-reviewed, but I didn't like it. Non-linear style, with so many unfamiliar words as to seem pretentious. I did not finish it.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I wasn't planning to revisit this book. I have a tree-book of it, and as I am the one who hooked my Young Gentleman Caller on Author Dillard's [Pilgrim at Tinker Creek] (his comment: "Fuck Walden! This is what {nature writing} should be!"), when he was Kindleshopping here this afternoon and saw this was $1.99, I said he could take the tree-book and not spend the money. We flipped through it together for a while....Three days a week she helped at the Manor Nursing Home, where people proved their keenness by reciting received analyses of current events. All the Manor residents watched television day and night, informed to the eyeballs like everyone else and rushed for time, toward what end no one asked. Their cupidity and self-love were no worse than anyone else's, but their many experiences having taught them so little irked Lou. One hated tourists, another southerners; another despised immigrants. Even dying, they still held themselves in highest regard. Lou would have to watch herself. For this way of thinking began to look like human nature—as if each person of two or three billion would spend his last vital drop to sustain his self-importance.That made us both laugh out loud. I mean, given where I am, I'm in a position to say "oh HELL yeah" to the truth imbued in that. And Rob, since he actually seeks my company out, asks me things, and *listens* when I answer (!!), is au fait with it, too. (I preen a little that he speaks without scorn of them, exasperating as they are; he commented once that I was not to plan to go down that road or he'd biff me one.)But that, most regrettably, was as good as it got.If she…had known how much her first half-inch beginning to let go would take—and how long her noticing and renouncing owning and her turning her habits, and beginning the slimmest self-mastery whose end was nowhere in sight—would she have begun?–and–What was it she wanted to think about? Here it was, all she ever wanted: a free mind. She wanted to figure out. With which unknown should she begin? Why are we here, we four billion equals who seem significant to ourselves alone? She rejected religion. She knew Christianity stressed the Ten Commandments, Jesus Christ as the only son of God who walked on water and rose up after dying on the cross, the Good Samaritan, and cleanliness is next to godliness. Buddhism and Taoism could handle all those galaxies, but Taoism was self-evident—although it kept slipping her mind—and Buddhism made you just sit there. Judaism wanted her like a hole in the head. And religions all said—early or late—that holiness was within. Either they were crazy or she was. She had looked long ago and learned: not within her. It was fearsome down there, a crusty cast-iron pot. Within she was empty. She would never poke around in those terrors and wastes again, so help her God.We kept reading to each other (I've made my hmmfyness about that well-known, but ya know what? it's different when you're in love with the reader! Go know from this shocking revelation, right?) as the hours ticked by and after about two were spent, we silently agreed to stop.It's in the Little Free Library if anyone wants to go get it. So very disappointing.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The Maytrees is a dense, lyrical book written in the style of the Beat poets, about a couple of bohemians who meet in Provincetown in the 1950s. Annie Dillard bounces around in time, flashing forward to the ends of the couple's lives, then back to their childhoods. Her well-read characters are as familiar with Greek philosophers as with friends living down the street, yet know how to keep a beach shack in good repair and fish for nearly anything. There's not much plot to it, but it's a beautifully written meditation on love, life, and dying. I listened to this book on CD, and I'm ordering a paperback copy so I can read it again and take my time.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Toby and Lou Maytree, meet, fall in love and marry, in post-war Cape Cod. The second half of the novel, shows them drifting apart. Much of Dillard's prose is lovely but the tone of the book feels cool and aloof. The characters are kept at a distance. Silhouettes. I wanted more depth and feeling. This may work better in poetry but I don't think it fits here, although other readers have praised this novel highly.I loved Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, so I wonder if she writes better nonfiction. I did not dislike it. I just wanted more.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    I found the style off-putting and it was just torture to read. I cared nothing about the characters and did not relate to any of them. I finished it only because it was a book club selection. There are a few memorable passages that show the author has talent (and earned her 1 star). But in general, I did notlike this book and do not recommend it.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Beautiful. Annie Dillard writes like no one else I know, except for maybe Marilynne Robinson. Her only weakness is that she only knows how to write one type of character (and the internal monologue of one type of character). :(
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I picked out this audio book completely at random, having never even heard of [author:Annie Dillard] before. (shame on me!) But what an excellent, poetic and thought-provoking exploration on what love is and what it means to live and love. Excellently written, too.

    The beginning of the novel is a bit slow and descriptive, but stick with it! The story and characters will capture your attention.

    This novel would make an excellent study for literature students, book clubs, and those reflecting on what it means to love, be in love, and live with love.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I approached this book warily, as it's fiction, and I've always thought that Dillard was best at essays and inquiries into the natural world. I was prepared to be disappointed, but I was not prepared to be, as I was, blown away. This book is an astonishing, lambent, transcendent meditation on love, marriage and humanity. The story of Toby and Lou Maytree, and their friends and families, works on many different levels. The book is like a photo fussed over in Photoshop- layer after translucent layer, each coloring the whole delicately and almost imperceptibly. Every word drops into place with a feeling of inevitability, so well crafted is this novel. Highly recommended.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The language is this book is really lovely. It's poetic, it's beautiful. I'm writing this review several months after finishing the book. I don't really remember much about the characters. I have some recollections of the plot. Those elements are not impressive. It's possible that this is a case of style over substance; pretty words that don't say much. But the words are very pretty.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Quite beautiful. The book is a poem, really. The images were beautiful and painful at the same time. I was sad when it ended.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The Maytrees is so beautifully written that it is a marvel to behold. It's hard to put into words of my own that would do the book justice. The story is about the lives of Lou and Toby Maytree, a couple who live on Cape Cod. There is a bare bones plot, that I won't spoil by reciting here, suffice it to say that it is about love and forgiveness, but the triumph of the book is its prose. It's the kind of book where you have to put it down often just to marvel. I could quote example after example, but even that would not do justice to the totality of the experience of reading this book. What keeps it from being a five star novel for me is that the narration seemed too detached for the intimacy of the story being told. I never thought that I was on the ground experiencing the story with the Maytrees. I felt as if I were observing the action from 20,000 feet.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Lyrical and enjoyable but her nonfiction works sets the bar way to high.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    Widely well-reviewed, but I didn't like it. Non-linear style, with so many unfamiliar words as to seem pretentious. I did not finish it.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    I received a recommendation on this from my aunt and we usually like the same kind of books, but I had a real problem with this one. After around page 100 I told her I was going to quit reading but she begged me to continue saying I wouldn't be sorry. But I am sorry. I could have been reading something really interesting. I just couldn't care what happened with Lou or Toby much less what Lou decides to do later in their lives. And the writing made me think of a poet "wanna be". Too much symbolism in a wavering format. Many times I had to re-read lines to try to figure out what was meant buy certain phrases.Some just didn't connect at all. Just too much work for what it was worth. Maybe it was written for loftier readers.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    With descriptions such as "a clumsy beach" and "a greasy sky," Annie Dillard's "The Maytrees" is nothing if not poetic. This book is perhaps best described as the concept of a book; rather than a detailed rendering it is an impressionistic portrayal. In beautifully poetic language Dillard gives us glimpses into the lives and thoughts of a love triangle as Toby Maytree first marries quiet and reserved Lou Bigelow and then, after fourteen years of seemingly happy marriage, later moves to Maine with dynamic and colorful Deary. But the plot is the fuzzy background; foremost are the lush descriptions and bemusing dollops of insight that, swirling around the characters and the setting, make for a full and poignant story of love, loss and forgiveness.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I enjoyed this gorgeously written story of Toby and Lou and their life in Cape Cod. Sounds so simple. Prose so rich.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is an atmospheric love story of Lou Bigelow and Toby Maytree in Provincetown. Their story begins shortly after World War II and moves forward in time. He's a poet and she's a painter. Their orbits merge in a community with loose social boundaries on Cape Cod. After 14 years of marriage and a child, there is a betrayal and 20 year separation. A reunion is brought about by failing health.The writing is more prose than narrative. The landscape of a peninsula in water is thematic in the story. The story challenges the reader to ponder love, solitude, acceptance, and the boundaries that we humans establish for ourselves.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I enjoyed the simple message that love can runs deeper than the betrayal and I appreciated the lyrical prose, but I mostly found the book to be rambling and disjointed. Either I wasn't intellectual enough to "get it" or it wasn't that good. I started over two or three times, trying to understand the plot. I really couldn't say I was glad I read it when all was said and done because reading it was such a chore. I found myself wondering who recommended this to me because they have completely discredited themselves. Thank goodness for Library Thing as I was able to make note that is was from Good Morning America's Summer Read spotlight from Jane Magazine.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Reminds me of a long ago trip to Provincetown. Very different world from this one though. Excellent read.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    A novel chronicling the life of a married couple from their courtship to their death. Throughout their marriage, they both grapple with trying to understand what love is, and what life is all about. Dillard's writing style is very pithy - she uses very short sentences, and occasionally a sentence that seems totally unrelated to anything else. Because of this, I found her characters to be rather flat: I just never felt like I really understood any of them, and I couldn't understand their actions, much less their emotions. The writing is amazing, but I didn't enjoy the story or the characters.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This was a very lyrical book. It took a litle to get back into how Annie Dillard writes - but I really enjoyed it. There was another review that described her stories as written in poetry, that seems to be a very apt description.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Annie Dillard is one of my favorite authors. I enjoy reading about nature & Dillard's prose can turn the barest fact into poetry. THE MAYTREES also reads like a poem. The subjects are the substance of poetry --the sea, the shore, the tides, the starry sky above & the mud-flat swamps below. The problem with this novel is the story. A man & woman fall in love. They have a child, which they love. The man is a poet, at least part-time. They live in a house by the sea, on Cape Cod, by Provincetown, one of this country's most artistic places. We are shown how they love, each other & the beauty of the sea & shore. What we are not shown is how they are able to hurt each other & disrupt the life of their child. I had no sense at all as to why these people acted as they did, only that the man, the poet, was some how above the moral standards of everyone else. And his lady friend who was "Bohemian" in her antics was also excused. And the wife who bears the cost of this mis-adventure? She sails serenely along, we are never shown nor told any emotional reactions on onybodys part. Annie Dillard wrote another novel "The Living" which I tried to read, but had to stop reading because everytime I began to fell close to a character, they died. In this novel, the characters live long lives, but we never feel close to them at all. The writing, however, is beautiful -- very poetic.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    I really disliked this. I didn't like the plot line and I didn't think I was smart enough to read Dillard's prose, which is actually poetry. I'm not one to wade through symbolism, just lay out the story already! Most of her efforts were wasted on me, I'm afraid.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Almost poetic diction
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Not an easy book for me to read as I was wondering what the author wanted me to get out of it. Never became swept away into the language although the location was pulling me to the sea. After I finished I was thinking about it and decided she was writing about love, not your typical love story. Not an easy book to read or understand but full of lovely language and set in a beautiful place.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Toby Maytree first sees Lou Bigelow on bicycle in postwar Provincetown, Massachusetts. Her laughter and loveliness catch his breath. Maytree is a Provincetown native, and educated poet of thirty. He courts Lou, just out of college, her stillness draws him. In spare, elegant prose, Dillard traces the Maytrees; decades of loving and longing.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    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.