Hearty thanks from all Hesperus Press to Adam Thorpe for his glowing review of Annie Dillard’s The Maytrees in Saturday’s Financial Times. It’s rare that a review is written in language almost as evocative as that of the book itself, but Adam Thorpe manages it:
The Maytrees is a painter’s, as well as a poet’s, novel: the scintillant quality of its brightness depends upon the dark areas…
‘The text smells of sea-spray and heather, and is spiced with strange words such as “swale” (a hollow between sand-ridges).
‘Halfway through the book we are given Lou’s quiet death in old age, her still-warm corpse “white above the waterline”. But this is in parenthesis: if the important work happens in life, it follows an inward, spiritual chronology only fiction can render. As well as Herman Melville, something of Dillard’s great Catholic compatriot Flannery O’Connor (who died a semi-invalid in 1964) is there in her unremitting sense of both doom and wonder, in the beauty of her prose and the boldness of her structure. The Maytrees is a quiet masterpiece.’
Glowing commendations there not only for The Maytrees, but also for Adam Thorpe’s own novels Between Each Breath and Birds With a Broken Wing.
Ellie
PS. Please excuse the formatting of this post. I have almost had a hernia attempting to fix it, and am conceding defeat. I’ll get you next time, gadget.
