Close Range: Brokeback Mountain and other stories

Wyoming Stories #1

by Annie Proulx

The inspiration behind ‘Life of Pi’ director Ang Lee’s ‘Brokeback Mountain’ is one of the short stories to be found in this haunting collection of Wyoming tales.

‘Brokeback Mountain’ is set in the beautiful, wild landscape of Wyoming where cowboys live as they have done for generations. Hard, lonely lives in unforgiving country. Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar are two ranch hands, glad to have found each other’s company where none had been expected. But companionship becomes something else on Brokeback Mountain, something not looked for – an intimacy neither can forget.

‘Brokeback Mountain’ was made into an Academy Award-winning film by Ang Lee, and starred Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Westerns, LGBT, Literature, Contemporary, Literary Fiction

322 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 10, 1999

About the author

Edna Annie Proulx (Chinese:安妮 普鲁) is an American journalist and author. Her second novel, The Shipping News (1993), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for fiction in 1994. Her short story "Brokeback Mountain" was adapted as an Academy Award, BAFTA and Golden Globe Award-winning major motion picture released in 2005. Brokeback Mountain received massive critical acclaim and went on to be nominated for a leading eight Academy Awards, winning three of them. (However, the movie did not win Best Picture, a situation with which Proulx made public her disappointment.) She won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for her first novel, Postcards.

She has written most of her stories and books simply as Annie Proulx, but has also used the names E. Annie Proulx and E.A. Proulx.

Reviews

[Julie G · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading Road Trip 2020

Current location: Wyoming

Nothing much but weather and distance. . .

Well, this is weird, but I'm getting ready to explain to you why Annie Proulx's short story collection of Wyoming ranchers reminds me of Toni Morrison's novel, Beloved, about a runaway slave who's haunted by a ghost.

Close Range and Beloved were published twelve years apart, and they don't have any themes in common, so it's quite possible that the writers themselves (were they both still alive) would be surprised by my strange comparison.

In my outspoken opinion, Toni Morrison is the best female writer the United States has ever produced, and I'm officially going to plunk down Annie Proulx right there next to her as a close #2.

(Even if you disagree with my assessment, you'd be hard pressed to categorize either of these authors as anything but “top ten.”).

And yet. . . they are not my favorite female writers and I often find their stories difficult to embrace.

Ms. Morrison's Beloved is so brilliant, it makes me want to yank the author right out of the grave and make her explain herself. I was stunned by the writing in that novel, like something dangled before me that I could never attain, but, when I was done reading it, I gave my copy away so I wouldn't need to see even the spine of the book on the shelf. I hated every page of it; I just wanted the whole story to go away.

This collection of Ms. Proulx's is equally difficult to embrace. The technical quality of the writing makes me want to shake her silly, right down to her boot spurs. Who in the hell do you think you are anyway, lady?? Same problem, though. . . I approached each story with a certain amount of dread, as though each one of these eleven stories represented eleven misanthropic ranchers with their backs turned to me in disinterest.

I don't like to wrestle with my stories, folks. I don't mean that I need to be spoon-fed, but I don't think the burden should be on me to wrestle with the beasts, either.

The stories here aren't equally unapproachable. Some are easier to enjoy than others: “A Lonely Coast,” and “The Bunchgrass Edge of the World,” to name two.

And, of course, you've heard of Brokeback Mountain? That one made its debut here, stuck its tongue out at you, then hopped a horse, bareback, and hauled ass toward the other direction.

It's interesting, isn't it, when you are in awe of sentences the flow like poetry off of the page, but you could give a rat's ass about the characters or their fate?

Ms. Proulx happens to be the author of one of my top 5 favorite novels, The Shipping News, and, overall, I can't help but recommend that one far more than this one.

But, the writing here can't be overlooked. The technical quality of this writing is almost unparalleled in American literature, and Wyoming has never had a greater translator.

That summer the horses were always wet. It rained uncommonly, the southwest monsoon sweeping in. The shining horses stood out on the prairie, withers streaming, manes dripping, and one would suddenly start off, a fan of droplets coming off its shoulders like a cape. Ottaline and Aladdin wore slickers from morning coffee to goodnight yawn. Wauneta watched the television weather while she ironed shirts and sheets. Old Red called it drip and dribble, stayed in his room chewing tobacco, reading Zane Grey in large-print editions, his curved fingernail creasing the page under every line. On the Fourth of July they sat together on the porch watching a distant storm, pretending the thick, ruddy legs of lightning and thunder were fireworks.

[Cecily · Rating 4 out of 5]

"It was her voice that drew you in... she could make you smell the smoke from an unlit fire."
That refers to a character in one of the stories, but is just as applicable to Proulx herself.

This is a collection of short stories of Wyoming ranchers, including Brokeback Mountain. It's a harsh environment and a harsh life: men and women alike have to be tough. "Wyos are touchers, hot blooded and quick, and physically yearning. Maybe it's because they spend so much time handling livestock".

There are few sympathetic characters, alleviated by dashes of dry humour. The stories generally focus more on the men, some of whom are very dodgy (including rape), although their behaviour is largely glossed over or condoned within their community. The visceral power of the elements and environment runs through all the stories, and the use of dialect and slightly clipped sentences is another similarity.

The Half-Skinned Steer
This is an old man's road trip to his brother's funeral, prompting reminiscence. There is a parallel story with a more mystical aspect.

He thinks of women like stock (as do many in the other stories), "What he wanted to know... was if Rollo had got the girlfriend away from the old man, thrown a saddle over her and ridden off into the sunset" and "she had long grey-streaked braids, Rollo could use them for reins." Not necessarily what one expects from a contemporary female writer, but I expect it's an accurate portrayal.

The Mud Below
Diamond Felts is an unpleasant and very small man (only 5' 3"), who is thrilled by his first bull ride, "dark lightning in his gut, a feeling of blazing real existence". He hits the road, performing in shows, and picking up (and dropping) women as he goes. One is described as "a half-hour painkiller but without the rush and thrill he got from a bull ride." He had a traumatic childhood, but that doesn't excuse the man he becomes.

Job History
Does what it says on the tin, as the Ronseal adverts used to say. This is a catalogue of blue-collar jobs in places with strange names: Unique, Poison Spider Road, Tongue River, Thermopolis, and Medicine Bow. I was amused that a man who came from Unique "travels all over the continent... he says every place is the same".

The Blood Bay
A very short story of amoral (or immoral?) opportunists - with a twist.

People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water
A haunting story two families, how the past can echo down the generations, culminating in an awful encounter. The woman kills one of her children, not entirely intentionally, and years later, another is physically and mentally impaired in a car accident.

The Bunchgrass Edge of the World
This has a fairytale aspect (a talking tractor?), but is ultimately about a power struggle within a family, and the role of women.

Pair a Spurs
For some reason, this story just didn't grab me, and I can't work out why, as it's not hugely different from the others.

A Lonely Coast
It's about middle aged (well, early 40s) single women (who might be labelled trailer trash), on the pull. It starts with a parallel between a burning house and difficult relationships. I didn't initially realise it was narrated by a woman, and when I did, I didn't realise which one!

The Governors of Wyoming
A poetic, long short story (with chapter headings). I liked the telling more than the story itself, which concerns some eco warriors and leaves the reader to ponder whether ends justify the means.

55 Miles to the Gas Pump
A very short story of a small-town crazy.

Brokeback Mountain
I knew this exquisite story well from the film, and the two are very similar.

It is a story of unexpected and irresistible passion, longing and loss - understated and never graphic.

Jack and Ennis meet, lust and love one summer, and meet up over the years, despite starting more conventional families. "The brilliant charge of their infrequent couplings was darkened by the sense of time flying, never enough time, never enough." But the '60s (and even '70s) weren't as swingin' as we're led to believe, certainly in their communities, so "nothing ended, nothing begun, nothing resolved". In the interim, "What J remembered and craved in a way he could neither help nor understand was... the silent embrace satisfying some shared and sexless hunger."

It happens to concern homosexual love between cowboys, starting in the 1960s, but it could just as easily be any taboo relationship.

The harsh beauty of the mountains, coupled with love and longing, reminded me a little of Cold Mountain, which I reviewed HERE.


Language
The clipped but run-on sentences are not as extreme as is sometimes the case in The Shipping News, (which I reviewed HERE), but they are naturalistic and colloquial. For example, "The horse drank and J dismounted, scraped icy water up in his hand, crystalline drops falling from his fingers, hi mouth and chin glistening wet." They also include representations of dialect, such as "ornery" and using "a" for "of" (as in the title, Pair a Spurs).

The main power comes in descriptions of the landscape (see quotes, below), but there are some quirkier offerings. For example, a radio announcer "who pronounced his own name as though he had discovered a diamond in his nostril": what on earth does that mean, and why does it work?

Wyoming Names
Men in Wyoming often have strange names, apparently, including (but not limited to): Ideal, Pet, Bliss, Diamond, Pearl, Mero, Rasmussen, Shy, Aladdin (though there was at least a reason for that), Car, Train, Pleasant, Elk, Zeeks and Fount!


Quotes (mainly about the Wyoming landscape)
* "The full moon rose, an absurd visage balanced in his rear-view mirror, above it curled a wig of cloud, filamented edges like platinum hairs."
* "The country poured open on each side... landforms shaped true to the past."
* "There was muscle in the wind... a great pulsing artery of the jet-stream swooping down... The snow snakes writhing across the asphalt."
* "With the lapping subtlety of the incoming tide the shape of the ranch began to gather in his mind."
* "He traveled against curdled sky... The light was falling out of the day."
* "He didn't have anything against X except that he was a humorless fascist who picked his nose and left pliant knobs of snot on the steering wheel"!
* "A murderer she might be but no one could say her house wasn't clean"!
* "The afternoon light was the same color of lemon juice."
* Something was "her fault through the osmosis of guilt".
* "The smile lay over his face as if it had been screwed on."
* "You can stand there, braced. Cloud shadows race over the buff rock stacks as projected film, casting a queasy, mottled ground rash. The air hisses... grassy plain everlasting, tumbled stones like fallen cities, the flaring roll of sky - provokes a spiritual shudder. It is like a deep note that cannot be heard but is felt, it is lie a claw in the gut."
* "He had a rancher's expectation of disaster."
* "Scrotal circumference is damn important" - not a phrase I have ever read before!
* She "was dissolving. It was too far to anything... She had eaten from a plateful of misery."
* "Simian arms whose wrists no shirt cuffs would ever kiss."
* "You don't leave [Wyoming] until you have to."
* A returner "maybe suffering some perverse need for animosity which he did find here."
* Middle aged women, "both of them burning at a slower rate than J, but in their own desperate ways also disintegrating into drifts of ash."
* "Clean arcs divided the windshield into a diptych, and their faces flared through the glass."
* "Metronomic shadows of telephone poles."
* "the point in reminiscence where their lives had diverged and superficial accounts rather than shared intimacies were the most that could be expected."
* Of eco warriors: "together they did harm where W said it would do most good."
* Papaya are "womb-shaped fruits with their middles full of seeds."
* "A wash of shame, an intention to do it again."
* "The sky showed a scraped nakedness, hard, and with a stain along the south western horizon from the Utah refineries."
* "This business with WW... served him as the balance column in the ledger of his own evil doings."
* He "lets a panel of the dream slide forward. If he does not force his attention on it, it might stoke the day."
* "The mountain boiled with demonic energy, glazed with flickering broken cloud-light."
* "Their bedroom was full of the smell of old blood and milk and baby shit, and the sounds were of squalling and sucking... all reassuring of fecundity and life's continuance to one who worked with livestock."
* "They stayed in the little apartment which he favored because it could be left at any time."
* "A slow corrosion worked between E and A, no real trouble, just widening water."
* "The boneless blue [sky] was so deep, said J, that he might drown looking up."
* "at the top of a steep stair that had its own climbing rhythm."

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

I appreciated this almost as well as the third in her collection of “Wyoming Stories”, Fine Just the Way It Is . There is a lot of variety among the eleven stories, but it has cohesion from the Wyoming setting and common struggles of people there to achieve their dreams, whether it’s ranching or rodeo bull riding. They keep you on your toes, as some stories end with a bang and others with a whimper, some stay coast downward in gritty reality and others break into the fantasy of a ghost story or mythic shaggy dog tale.

Like most other readers, my favorite story is the one with the most emotional draw, “Brokeback Mountain.” I am not usually a fan of short stories because I always seem to want more. But the compression of this form has some special power to wallop you by forcing your own imagination to fill in the blanks. Having seen the long lingering scenes of the movie spoiled some of that power of the story for me. Still, it was wonderful to experience the narrative version of some of the more powerful points of the tale (the first embraces, the mad kiss on reuniting years later in the eyesight of Ennis’ wife, and the poignant scene at the end when Ennis visits Jack’s boyhood room). It really seems that the world was waiting for this account of gay men out of synch with the manly world of the West, and it seems quite an achievement for a woman to pull off with such power and economy

The other story that moved me the most was the one about the bull-rider, Diamond Felts in “The Mud Below”. I could identify with the allure of rodeo glory from the dreams of my fellow students where I grew up in a tiny town in Oklahoma, where the only other prospect seemed to be working in an oil refinery. Proulx makes you empathize with Diamond’s pitiful home life and his attraction to the drug of success at rodeo riding. As the seedy parts of that life begin to take hold, empathy turns to pity, and then, wham, his treatment of women reveals the tip of the iceberg in the form of the monster in his heart. It makes me want to sing: “Mama, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys. Let them be doctors and lawyers and such”:

He almost always has a girl in the motel bed with him when he could afford a motel, a half-hour painkiller but without the rush and thrill he got from a bullride. There was no sweet time when it was over. He wanted them to get gone. …
There was no one in his life to slow him down with love. Sometimes riding the bull was the least part of it, but only the turbulent ride gave him the indescribable rush, shot him with mainline with crazy-ass elation. In the arena everything was real because none of it was real except the chance to get dead.

The big draw for me with this book is not in the quirky plots but Proulx’s writing style, which other people either love or hate. If you want to get a real earful from the latter camp, check out B.R. Myers’ A Reader's Manifesto: An attack on the growing pretentiousness of American literary prose . He is not happy with how she will unroll a clashing nest of metaphors like a machine gun (to use a metaphor). I find the technique exhilarating, somewhat like the energy that burst forth at a poetry slam. Judge for yourself:

"The Half-Skinned Steer" (which first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, in November of 1997), starts with this sentence: ‘In the long unfurling of his life, from tight-wound kid hustler in a wool suit riding the train out of Cheyenne to geriatric limper in this spooled-out year, Mero had kicked down thoughts of the place where he began, a so-called ranch on strange ground at the south hinge of the Big Horns.’ Like so much modern prose, this demands to be read quickly, with just enough attention to register the bold use of words. Slow down, and things fall apart. Proulx seems to have intended a unified conceit, but unfurling, or spreading out, as of a flag or an umbrella, clashes disastrously with the images of thread that follow. (Maybe "unraveling" didn't sound fancy enough.) A life is unfurled, a hustler is wound tight, a year is spooled out, and still the metaphors continue, with kicked down—which might work in less crowded surroundings, though I doubt it—and hinge, which is cute if you've never seen a hinge or a map of the Big Horns. And this is just the first sentence!

At the bottom of his carping is an argument that her efforts at style interfere with immersion in the story:
… after a while the reader stops trying to think about what the metaphors mean. Maybe this is the effect that Proulx is aiming for; she seems to want to keep us on the surface of the text at all times, as if she were afraid that we might forget her quirky narratorial presence for even a line or two.

My objection to this is that her wordplay for me doesn’t call attention to the writer’s presence any more than a jazz riff interferes with hearing the music instead of imagining the composer. By analogy, you could say Picasso was a stylist with a lot of focus on surface forms, but that doesn’t interfere with the narrative impact in the case of the civilian bombing in his “Guernica.” To use another metaphor, the beginning sentence quoted above seems to me like dancing with abandon out on thin ice before letting the reader sink through into the story. Works for me.

[Melki · Rating 5 out of 5]

Once again, Annie Proulx proves she's got bigger balls than most of the male writers out there.
Whether they're roping, ranching, or riding the rodeo, the characters in these tales are all tough, hard-living people who do what needs to be done and don't spend a lot of time whining about it.

Some of their exploits made my mouth drop open:

Their endurance of pain was legendary. When a section of narrow mountain trail broke away under Marion's horse, the horse falling with him onto rocks below, the animal's back broken and Marion's left leg, he shot the horse, splinted his own leg with some yucca stalks and his wild rag, whittled a crutch from the limb he shot off a scrub cedar, and in three days hopped twenty miles to the Shiverses' place, asked for a drink of water, swallowed it, pivoted on the cedar crutch, and began to hop toward the home ranch, another seven miles east, before George Shivers cajoled him into a wagon. Shivers saw then what he missed before--Marion had carried his heavy stock saddle the distance.

These are leathery-skinned, no-nonsense people. They don't sit around in drumming circles, talking about their feelings. Even the womenfolk are super tough:

When the youngest girl, Mabel, was a few months old they made a journey into Laramie, the infant howling intolerably, the wagon bungling along, stones sliding beneath the wheels. As they crossed the Little Laramie Mrs. Tinsley stood up and hurled the crying infant into the water. The child's white dress filled with air and it floated a few yards in the stiff current, then disappeared beneath a bower of willows at the bend. The woman shrieked and made to leap after the child but Horm Tinsley held her back. They galloped across the bridge and to the river's edge below the bend.
Gone and gone.

Gulp!

See what I mean? This lady writer has got cojones. Big ones.

Even one of her characters admits: "Anyway, you're comin a the bull sale. And I'll give you a pointer you don't want to forget. Scrotal circumference is damn important."

Never stop learning.

[Michael Finocchiaro · Rating 4 out of 5]

Close Range is a collection of short stories that all take place in Wyoming by Annie Proulx. I found the quality of the stories a bit uneven, despite truly appreciating two of them and, of course, having seen the eponymous film made out of the last one, "Brokeback Mountain." Each of the stories features the natural beauty of Wyoming (a state in which I have never set foot), but all are also brutal tales of abandon and violence (mostly against women and, in one case, against homosexuals.) The writing itself is good and visual, as one would expect in short stories where the writer has to capture and hold the reader's attention for just a short while.

Most of the stories focus on an object which is the center around which the characters pivot during the story: a half-skinned steer, a pair of spurs, pictures of Wyoming governors. My favorite ones in the collection here: 'The Half-Skinned Steer', 'Pair a Spurs' and, of course, 'Brokeback Mountain' which was truly exceptional. Here are some random quotes I enjoyed.

From "The Half-Skinned Steer":
With the lapping subtlety of incoming tide the shape of the ranch began to gather in his mind; he could recall the intimate fences he'd made, taut wire and perfect corners, the draws and rock outcrops, the watercourse valley steepening, cliffs like bones with shreds of meat on them rising and rising, and the stream plunging suddenly underground, disappearing into subterranean darkness of blind fish..." (p. 31)

It was her voice that drew you in, that low tangy voice, wouldn't matter if she was saying the alphabet, what you heard was the rustle of hay. She could make you smell the smoke from an unlit fire. (p. 33)

From "The Mud Below":
It was a hard, fast ride that ended in the mud. He passed a coal train in the dark, the dense rectangles that were the cars gliding against the indigo night, another, and another, and another. Very slowly, as slowly as light comes on a clouded morning, the euphoric heat flushed through him, or maybe it was just the memory of it. (p. 78)

From "The People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water":
Other cultures have camped here a while and disappeared. Only earth and sky matter. Only the endless repeated floor of morning light. You begin to see that God does not owe us much beyond that. (p. 97)

From "A Lonely Coast":
You ever see a house burning up in the night, way to hell and gone out there on the plains? Nothing but blackness and your headlights cutting a little wedge into it, could be the middle of the ocean for all you can see. And in that big dark a crown of flame the size of your thumbnail trembles. You'll drive for an hour seeing it until it burns out or you do, until you pull of the road to close your eyes or look up at sky punctured with bullet holes. And you might think about the people in the burning house, see them trying for the stairs, but mostly you don't give a damn. They are too far away. Like everything else. (p. 187)

There were times when I thought the Buckly was the best place in the world, but it could shift on you and then the whole dump seemed a mess of twist-face losers, the women with eyebrows like crowbars, the men covered with bristly red hair, knuckles the size of new potatoes, showing the gene pool was small and the rivulets that once fed it had dried up. (p. 198)

The most important story here is that of "Brokeback Mountain" which was a massive hit (3 Oscars) when made into a movie directed by Ang Lee and starring Jake Gyllenhaal and the late Heath Ledger (I had forgotten that he played this role before Joker in The Dark Knight!) I sort of wish I had read the story before seeing the movie, because naturally, rather than conjuring up new images as I read, my mind was busy recalling scenes from the movie as I read the story. As in the film, the story is an unlikely homosexual relationship between two cowboys in the back country of Wyoming, Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar.

He has to be packed and away from the place that morning. Again the ranch is on the market and they've shipped out the last of the horses, paid everybody off the day before, the owner saying, "Give em to the real estate shark, I'm out a here," dropping the keys in Ennis' hand. He might have to stay with his married daughter until he picks up a job, yet he is suffused with a sense of pleasure because Jack Twist was in his dream.
The stale coffee is boiling up, but he catches it before it goes over the side, pours it into a stained cup and blows on the black liquid, lets a panel of the dream slide forward. If he does not force his attention on it, it might stoke the day, rewarm that old, cold time on the mountain when the owned the world and nothing seemed wrong. The wind strikes the trailer like a load of dirt coming off a dump truck, eases, dies, leaves a temporary silence. (p. 253)

Out west among cowpokes and rednecks and Bible-thumping ignoramuses, there is, of course, no acceptance of homosexuality. The love between the two men is both passionate and doomed, both know it but neither will fully admit it. Jack is the more reckless of the two, but Ennis holds back. And is unable to look Jack in the face. What Jack remembers and craved in a way he could neither help nor understand was the time that distant summer on Brokeback when Ennis had come up behind him and pulled him close, that silent embrace satisfying some shared and sexless hunger. (p. 276)

At the end of the tale, we return the Ennis' dreams: Around that time Jack began to appear in his dreams, Jack as he had first seen him, curly-headed and smiling and bucktoothed, talking about getting up off his pockets and into the control zone, but the can of beans with the spoon handle jutting out and balanced on the log was there as well, in a cartoon shape and lurid colors that gave the dreams a flavor of comic obscenity. The spoon handle was the kind that could be used as a tire iron. And he would wake sometimes in grief, sometimes with the old sense of joy and release; the pillow sometimes wet, sometimes the sheets.
There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe, but nothing could be done about it, and if you can't fix it you've got to stand it. (p. 283)

Ultimately, societal norms destroy what could have been a beautiful love relationship between Jack and Ennis. The two men pass it off at first as just a function of their lonely job on the mountain and as a result of the taboo. However, the fact that they continue to see each other for years points to the fact that there truly was love between them. Personally, I am mystified at how homosexuality can provoke such violence in its detractors, some of whom being repressed homosexuals themselves. This story was incredibly important, because it exposed in an non-confrontational way the real possibility of love between virile men and the tragedy of a society that refuses to embrace their relationship.

This book was a runner-up for the 2000 Pulitzer, won that year by what I considered to be a rather lackluster Interpreter of Maladies which was also a collection of short stories. Not having read Waiting, I cannot speak for that book, but I think that Close Range was stronger than the winner in any case. Proulx is a gifted writer, but I preferred The Shipping News and her description of Newfoundland to this collection of stories about Wyoming. She does have a way of describing great spaces, somewhat analogous, I think, to Pynchon's penchant for describing chaotic, anarchic places.

[J · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tell you what, them queer cowboys like to broke my heart. Annie Proulx, I wish I knew how to quit you.

Your strange mix of roughed up realism and supernatural does something to my insides. It’s too much for ordinary sentence structure. Pours out all over the confines of punctuation, seeping into my subconscious until I’m drunk and reeling reading just a sentence then a few paragraphs and soon the whole story to anyone who’ll listen. And still I want more.

[amapola · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eccentrica, durissima, commovente, ironica, drammatica, straziante. Davvero eccellente questa raccolta di racconti, di cui fa parte il celeberrimo Brokeback Mountain (ma non è l’unica perla qui presente).
Le storie ti riducono a uno straccio, ma la prosa, nella sua complessità, è vivida, minuziosa, ogni racconto ha una diversa sfumatura di intensità e le descrizioni del Wyoming sono visivamente efficaci, posso vedere le tempeste, il vento, la polvere… La natura, i paesaggi sono impressionanti, tanto da assurgere al ruolo di protagonisti e dare la sensazione di poter influenzare i personaggi e la storia che sta per accadere.
Ci vuole un’anima sensibile e coraggiosa per vedere tanta bellezza nella durezza della vita, tanta profondità nella banalità della vita.
Brava, Annie!

[Wera · Rating 1 out of 5]

1.5 stars

Hate the writing. Hate the stories. Cool ideas, but I don't gel with Proulx's style.
Sorry, but for class I'mma read Sparknotes.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was possibly my least enjoyed out of the group I've recently finished reading. There's loads of sex, about ROUGH, tough - dare I say minimally educated people - in the great Wyoming wilderness. Proulx spreads her stories through time - so there is a quirky story about a horse presumably, chewing off the legs of a cowboy - because horse and men are all huddled together in a cabin to avoid the intense night cold; others are possibly mid-century and some right up to date - with the famous - 'Broke Back Mountain' featuring as the last story. This I was disappointed with - having already seen the film - which follows the original story - blow for blow - and doesn't add a single new or erroneous detail - so I couldn't help but find the story falling short of expectations.

I did, however, love the ROUGH hard, details and convincing descriptions of those high desert and mountain places of Wyoming. I visited the Canadian Rockies some years ago - and I recognized the same feeling on reading Proulx's landscapes - the same kind of questions popping into my head - how does anything or anyone survive out here - there?

You stand there, braced. Cloud shadows race over the buff rock stacks as a projected film, casting a queasy, mottled ground rash. The air hisses and it is no local breeze but the great harsh sweep of wind from the turning earth. The wild country - indigo jags of mountain, grassy plain everlasting, tumbled stones like fallen cities, the flaring roll of sky - provokes a spiritual shudder. It is like a deep note that cannot be heard but is felt, it is like a claw in the gut.

I also think this book should come with a warning - the main word that you want to use is BRUTAL, along with Rough - so if you're squeamish, don't like blood, accidents - that kind of thing - be warned. Here's a bit of Raw Brutality:

"There you go," said the doctor. "Dislocated shoulder. Humerus displaced forwards from the shoulder socket. All right, I'm going to try to reposition the humerus." The doctor's chin was against the back of his shoulder, his hands taking the useless arm, powerful smell of tobacco. "This will hurt for a minute. I'm going to manipulate this-"
"Jesus CHRIST!" The pain was excruciating and violent. The tears rolled down his hot face and he couldn't help it.
"Cowboy up," said the doctor sardonically.

(There is a white space and then in the next para - a different type of brutality.)

Pake Bitts walked in, looked at him with interest.
"Got hung up, hah? I didn't see it but they said you got hung up pretty good. Twenty-eight seconds. They'll put you on the videos. Thunderstorm out there." He was damp from the shower, last week's scab still riding his upper lip and a fresh raw scrape on the side of his jaw. He spoke to the doctor. "Throw his shoulder out? Can he drive? It's his turn a drive. We got a be in south Texas two o'clock tomorrow afternoon."

One of the ways you can make a living in this part of the world - Proulx is making her point. But I like the fact she is at pains to draw our attention to the cattle ranchers - the big guys - who never actually visit the farms in 'Pair of Spurs'. They exploit water, soils and humans in their focus on the highest possible dollar sales - so her stories - which I suppose are based on research and reality -plus the fact that she lives there - provide insider information.

She also glances in her story, 'The Governors of Wyoming' on Indigenous people - where a man walking on the highway, deftly removes the car keys from a rich rancher, a key character - Shy, and asks him what he wants. Shy wants a young girl - and the Indian complies with his wishes - for a fee. So, the point about her stories - there are layers of reality - layers of history, the interconnections of different people - all contributing to the present reality of this American State.

I liked it. I don't know whether I Enjoyed it. That first story - I knew what was coming, and I barely had the stomach to keep reading - 'The Half-Skinned Steer' - this story pivots on the animal's point of view.

I started watching "Unforgiven" last night - Clint's pivotal Western - for which he was awarded the Oscars for his alternative perspective - and I suppose Proulx is following on in this direction - I want to award her - it was certainly a preferable read to McMurtry's 'Lonesome Dove'.

[Kathleen · Rating 3 out of 5]

“'This is a miserable place,’ she said. ‘My god it’s miserable.’”

I’m sorry, Wyoming, but nothing I read here convinced me otherwise. I had some hope when I started that Annie Proulx could show me something beautiful about this part of the country. But there was a lot of ugly in these stories.

I lived in a small western town, and so much of this was familiar. You have to admire the strength and the sheer scrappiness of ranchers, but even the time I spent reading these stories was too long to spend with them. Only the excellent writing could keep me reading.

“It was all a hard, fast ride that ended in the mud.”

Brokeback Mountain was by far my favorite, and for me, had the most beauty. Job History shows in just a few pages what small-town life can be like. People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water might be the best title ever, and is a completely devastating read. The Governors of Wyoming … well, I’ll just leave you with this quote:

"Here’s Doc Osborne, first Democratic Governor. A lynch mob hung Big Nose George Parrott back in the 1870’s. Doc got the body, skinned it, tanned the hide, made himself a medical bag and a pair of shoes. Wore the shoes to his inauguration. They don’ t make democrats like that anymore.”

[Lorna · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Denver each year for several weeks in January, we celebrate cowboys and their culture with the National Western Stock Show drawing people from throughout the American West. There was a favorite western boutique shop in the trendy Lower Downtown, The Crybaby Ranch, that dealt in everything western including beautiful boots and western hats, beautiful books and many fashion accessories. And upon the opening of the stock show, this shop would have an invitation only, fabulous party. Excited to be there in the midst of all of the celebration, taking a glass of champagne and looking around, I saw Denver’s own gifted and renowned water colorist, William Matthews, and by his side was Annie Proulx signing their latest book together, Cowboys and Images: The Watercolors of William Matthews. Needless to say, I left with an autographed copy of that book. However, their first collaboration was for this book, Close Range: Wyoming Stories, where his six watercolors and the beautiful cover create an eloquent and visual dialogue of this incredible book of short stories.

The eleven unforgettable stories in Close Range includes her famed story, Brokeback Mountain. Annie Proulx’s masterful language and beautiful prose portrays her fierce love of Wyoming in this collection of short stories about loneliness and violence and obsession. These are stories of desperation and hard times set in a harsh landscape that at the same time can be magnificent.

“You stand there, braced. Cloud shadows race over the buff rock stacks as a projected film, causing a queasy, mottled ground rash. The air hisses and it is no local breeze but the great harsh sweep of wind from the turning of the earth. The wild country—indigo jags of mountain, grassy plain everlasting, tumbled stones like fallen cities, the flaring roll of sky—provokes a spiritual shudder. It is like a deep note that cannot be heard but is felt, it is like a claw in the gut.”

And as the book cover so eloquently states: “Stories in Close Range have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, and GQ. They have been selected for the O. Henry Stories 1998 and The Best American Short Stories of the Century and have won the National Magazine Award for Fiction. This is work by an author writing at the peak of her craft.”

[Darryl Suite · Rating 5 out of 5]

Annie Proulx, adopt me.

[Connie G · Rating 4 out of 5]

The stark beauty of wide open spaces and the love of outdoor life bonded many of the characters to the land in Annie Proulx's first book of her Wyoming trilogy. But other characters left the hardships, isolation, and loneliness of the rural Wyoming towns, never to return. Some worked tough, physical, low-paying jobs in the harsh Wyoming environment and used alcohol to cope. Wealthy people bought failing ranches to use as dude ranches for weekend getaways.

Close Range: Wyoming Stories is composed of eleven short stories with the prize winners at the beginning and the end of the book. "The Half-Skinned Steer" is based on an Icelandic folk tale with a twist at the end. "Brokeback Mountain" is the tragic love story of two gay cowboys and homophobia, and has been adapted into a film by Ang Lee. "The Mud Below" tells about a bull rider who is living for the adrenalin rush, and who is compensating for problems with his parents. "The Blood Bay" is a Western tale with a comic twist.

Annie Proulx lived in Wyoming for several years before writing Close Range: Wyoming Stories, and uses many regional expressions in her prose. The Wyoming environment is a character in many of the stories. Although many characters are portrayed with broken bodies and broken spirits after years on the range or in the rodeo, there is a lot of dark humor too. The six watercolor illustrations of Western scenes by William Matthews in the hardcover book were an added plus.

[Albus Eugene Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore · Rating 4 out of 5]

«Altre culture hanno piantato le tende qui e sono scomparse.»
Undici racconti ambientati in Wyoming, oltre un secolo dopo la conclusione delle guerre indiane. Terra aspra e spesso ostile. Uno dei simboli dello stato è il Bisonte. Terra dai paesaggi mozzafiato, tra ranch e parchi nazionali voluti da Theodore Roosevelt, ricordate? quello del “You've made this Grizzly look like a hairy cow" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyZAub...
Undici racconti, Il manzo scuoiato a mezzo, Un paio di speroni, Giù nel fango, L’erba al confine del mondo, e ancora Gente del Wyoming, da cui è stato tratto Brokeback Mountain. Storie dure, dove va in scena l’America profonda; quella del Mito della Frontiera; quella dove stivali, speroni, cavalli, merda di vacca e Winchester sopra l’uscio di casa, sono ancora oggi ben radicati.
Nelle elezioni presidenziali del 2016, Donald ha avuto il 70,1% delle preferenze ...
Da Wikipedia: «Il Wyoming è uno Stato degli Stati Uniti, quello con minore popolazione. Confina a nord con il Montana, a est con il Dakota del Sud e il Nebraska, a sud con il Colorado e a ovest con lo Utah e l'Idaho. La capitale dello Stato è Cheyenne. Il nome Wyoming deriva dalla parola in lingua munsee “xwé:wamənk” che significa presso il grande fiume calmo usata in origine per denominare la Wyoming Valley in Pennsylvania. Fort Laramie (1834) fu il primo avamposto americano nella regione.».
«La realtà non è mai un granché utile, da queste parti.»
Sarà un caso se Clint ha ambientato il suo Gli spietati proprio in Wyoming? E sarà di certo un caso se anche The Hateful Eight … http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXlI6E...
Splendidi. Semplicemente.
Del resto, lo aveva già detto molto bene lei … http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

[Charissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely love E. Annie Proulx. She does that thing with words that makes me go all dissociated from the world around me and live inside the world she creates. I am almost always disturbed by her stories but I can't stop reading them. In fact, her writing is so good that when I saw "Brokeback Mountain" (which I saw *before* I read her short fic on which it was based), I didn't think it was a great story... until I read her actual story. There is ONE line in her piece that makes the story GREAT which was impossible to convey in pictures. IMHO that is what makes a great writer. It's not just what they say, but the exact way in which they say it which makes the art.

I love E. Annie Proulx so much, in fact, that for years I didn't notice the "E." at the beginning of her name... and by the time I noticed, I didn't care.

I sent a copy of this book to my 87 year old Great Aunt Georgene Conley, the cowboy poetess who lives in Belle Fourche, South Dakota. She wrote back that she loved the book, as did many of her friends who she passed it along to. If a bunch of mid-western cowboy poets can read a gay love story and love it, you know it has to be good writing.

[Erin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Before Brokeback Mountain gets taken entirely out of context, take a look at Annie Proulx's Close Range: Wyoming Stories, the collection in which the story is featured. If you've seen the movie but have yet to read the story, I suggest you begin here. If you've already read the story by itself, come back to this collection entire. While Diana Ossana (one of the movie's produces & screenwriters) came across it in the New Yorker and felt inspired to write a screenplay, the story itself does not simply stand alone. Certainly it can be read on its own - each story in Close Range probably can. Characters don't reappear in other stories, nor are they connected through some precise, intricate web-work that is all neatly laid out in the end. But these stories do a strange, concentric dance, each upon the other. And "Brokeback Mountain" comes last - not first, and not alone. There is a reason for this. The richness of "Brokeback Mountain," the fullness of the story, is somewhat lost without the other stories that come before it. That may seem impossible given how beautiful the story is already, but it's true. That's part of the magic of literature, and testament to Annie Proulx's excellent writing, which is beautiful, both tender and harsh, relentless as the land she writes about. These stories are all about loneliness, about work, about love, all of which is washed out by "the endlessly repeated flood of morning light. You begin to see that God does not owe us much beyond that."

[Ian Hewitt · Rating 5 out of 5]

A truly wonderful book, that I don't mind telling you made me cry like a baby.

"Nobody leaves Wyoming unless they have to," Annie Proulx. I'm pleased I waited until I had to leave Wyoming to read this book, despite it stirring powerful feelings of homesickness. I had encountered 1-2 Proulx stories in the New Yorker before now, I had loved the film version of Brokeback Mountain, and of course, I lived in Laramie for a decade where Proulx is something of a quiet celebrity.

The passage quoted below, from 'People in Hell Just Want A Drink of Water' is, for me, at the heart of this collection. Proulx's characterization is second-to-none (better, perhaps, than even Stephen King, whose characters are among the best crafted in all of American lit.), and yet, despite the accuracy, and feeling with which she crafts her characters, their stories are often disjointed and incomplete. This is because, people, culture, civilization, all of this shrinks when you stand on the prairie in the shadow of the mountains and you feel that Wyoming wind, "no local breeze, but the great harsh sweep of wind from the turning of the earth."

"Dangerous and indifferent ground: against its fixed mass the tragedies of people count for nothing although the signs of misadventure are everywhere. No past slaughter nor cruelty, no accident nor murder that occurs on the little ranches or at the isolate crossroads with their bare populations of three or seventeen, or in the reckless trailer courts of mining towns delays the flood of morning light. Fences, cattle, roads, refineries, mines, gravel pits, traffic lights, graffiti'd celebration of athletic victory on bridge overpass, crust of blood of the Wal-Mart loading dock, the sun-faded wreaths of plastic flowers marking death on a highway are ephemeral. Other cultures have camped here a while and disappeared. Only earth and sky matter. Only the endlessly repeated flood of morning light. You begin to see that God does not owe us much beyond that."

P.S.
And, if my recommendation has persuaded you to read Close Range, but you're wondering what to listen to while doing so, well, then let me recommend the perfect playlist. It will enhance, not distract, from Annie Proulx's eternal, melancholic Wyoming.


Close Range: (A Literary Soundtrack)

Nick Cave's 'Music from: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford'


"A Good Man is Hard to Find", "An Old Watermill by a Waterfall", and "A Thousand Goodnights" - Milton Brown (Milton Brown and His Musical Brownies)


"Nebraska" - Bruce Springsteen (Nebraska)


"The Sky Above, the Mud Below" and "Prairie in the Sky" - Tom Russell (Song of the West)


"Good Run & Good Luck" - Clint Black (No Time To Kill)


"Honky Tonk Man" and "Guitars, Cadillacs" - Dwight Yoakum (Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc. Etc.)


Various Artists' 'Brokeback Mountain (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)'


Nick Cave's 'The Proposition'

[Ο σιδεράς · Rating 4 out of 5]

Με ελάχιστες λήψεις της κάμερας η Proulx μάς στέλνει έντεκα καρτ ποστάλ απ’ το Wyoming· τη γη του Yellowstone, των ράντσων, του Τραμπ, του βρωμόκρυου.

Ένας φράχτης του οποίου οι πάσσαλοι  συγκλίνουν καθώς πλησιάζουν το σημείο φυγής, μία ανορθόγραφα γραμμένη ταμπέλα με κάποιο σύνθημα για τη μακρινή Ουάσιγκτον, τοπία άγρια, χαρακωμένα  από τα στοιχεία της φύσης, όπως τα πρόσωπα των χαρακτήρων της Proulx.

Με αυτούς τους χαμένους στο πουθενά χωριάταρους ασχολείται η συγγραφέας, περισσότερο εξωτικούς στα μάτια μου κι από κατοίκους της Πολυνησίας – αγενείς αγρίους με καραμπίνες, ελάχιστα χρήσιμες για άμυνα απέναντι στις απανωτές γκαντεμιές.

Χωρίς να μου δώσει την ανατριχίλα του postcards, η γραφή της Proux είναι το ίδιο αληθινή με το πρώτο της μυθιστόρημα. Για κάποιο λόγο μου θυμίζει ένα φθαρμένο φανελένιο  πουκάμισο που μπορεί να μην είναι για μόστρα αλλά που το κρατάς και το αγαπάς, χωρίς να μπορείς να εξηγήσεις στον εαυτό σου το γιατί.. 

“Η πορεία της ζωής του έμοιαζε πιο αργή απ’ το μαχαίρι, αλλά σίγουρα το ίδιο σχολαστική. Υπήρχαν και άλλα στη ζωή, υπέθετε, κι άκουσε πάλι τη βραχνή, φορτισμένη φωνή της να λέει “Τα πάντα”. Όλα ήταν μια σκληρή, γρήγορη κούρσα που κατέληγε στη λάσπη. Πέρασε ένα καρβουνιάρη μες στο σκοτάδι, τα πυκνά ορθογώνια των βαγονιών να γλιστράνε στο λουλάκι της νύχτας, κι άλλο ένα, κι άλλο ένα, κι άλλο ένα.” 105

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love E. Annie Proulx. I honestly think that Myers guy must just have some problems he's got to sort out. I didn't read his book, but the examples he gave in that article of how awful her prose is only reminded me how much I enjoy her stuff, and made me want to go back and read some Proulx again. And I really don't think I'm especially pretentious, or cowed by snooty literary reviewers, whom I barely read. In fact I barely read at all these days, I have such a short attention span, and to me this is the accessible literature for the distractable masses that Myers is moaning gets no respect. Proulx tells wonderful stories, and she tells them wonderfully. That's it, buddy! Yeah, her writing's wordy and weird, and maybe doesn't make much logical sense when analyzed adjective-by-adjective by a cranky old pedant who suggests that female authors are particularly terrible and sloppy and not up to par with the wonderful masculine greats of yesteryear..... hey, come to think of it, screw you, B. R. Myers! E. A. Proulx's a woman, and a fabulous writer! Go team!

THHPT!!!!

[Carol, She's so Novel ꧁꧂ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Proulx is so good she can make me like short stories. So good she can make her words almost poetic in their beauty about Wyoming - a place where the inhabitants need to be tougher than their environment. It is a bleak hardscrabble world with only the grimmest sort of humour.

As other reviewers have mentioned, Brokeback Mountain is the outstanding tale - a love story of surprising tenderness. & I find Job History oddly flat - I'm sure it was deliberate & I have missed some subtle nuances.

An awesome achievement.

[Elizabeth (Alaska) · Rating 4 out of 5]

None of the characters in this collection has an easy time of it. Nearly all come from poor and/or broken homes. Many left home too young for them to have had much of a chance. With few exceptions, these characters have unusual, distinctive names. No matter their names, they seem real enough.

The prose of Annie Proulx that I loved in The Shipping News and Postcards was best displayed in the last story of this collection Brokeback Mountain. It flowed more easily, and it was clear that she felt for these two men: Ennis, who could barely accept who he was, and Jack, who so desperately needed Ennis. I have not - and will not - see the film. I don't know what they might have done to this story, but probably came close to ruining it.

I liked The Mud Below about a young man who chooses to become a rodeo bull rider. Rodeo night in a hot little Okie town and Diamond Felts was inside a metal chute a long way from the scratch on Wyoming dirt he named as home, sitting on the back of bull 82N, a loose-skinned brindle Brahma-cross identified in the program as Little Kisses. I'm sure there are lifestyles more difficult than a bull rider on the circuit, but most of us don't know about them.

One of the darkest stories is People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water. A woman doesn't get much of a life out in the middle of nowhere Wyoming. She might see her chance to walk away from a man and leave him to raise the nine boys she bore him. But what happens to those children? At barely two pages, the shortest story is 55 Miles to the Gas Pump. Proulx might have intended more humor in the stories than I got. 55 Miles may be the darkest humor I've ever encountered and yet it was definitely there.

As with any collection, there is bound to be a story that just missed the mark for the reader and there were those, too. All in all this is a good collection and I'm happy to give it 4-stars. Only for those 2-3 misses does it fall short of the 5-star mark.

[Ria · Rating 3 out of 5]

do i like the Brokeback movie? no not really, i was bored out of my mind. did i love the Brokeback story tho? fuck yeah and imma say it, it's the only good one. don't really remember the other stories.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are twelve short stories in this collection of Wyoming stories by Annie Proulx.

There are two stories that I loved and that are also renowned. The first is:

1. The Half-Skinned Steer - this story made the 100 best of the 20th Century Short Stories collection edited by John Updike. The protagonist returns to Wyoming and foolishly underestimates the extent of the isolated roads and winter blizzards. This is probably the best of the stories in describing the scenery and imagery of the state.

2. Brokeback Mountain - this is a six star story hands down and hits a home run on every level. The affair between Jack and Ennis is so visceral, beautiful, painful, tragic and vivid. It is one of those very rare stories that is so masterfully wrought that this reader became so immersed and forgot it was fiction. It is impressive how much Proulx was able to convey in just thirty pages.

4 stars. Read it for Brokeback Mountain if nothing else.

[Colin Miller · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’m more inclined to recommend individual stories out of E. Annie Proulx’s Close Range as opposed to the whole book. Every story is set in Wyoming (as is noted by the book’s subtitle). This makes for an interesting dynamic as the reader already has an idea of what Wyoming is like and a setting description given in one story can bleed over into the others. The most famous story is now “Brokeback Mountain” because nothing promotes a book like the movie. (For the record, “Brokeback Mountain” is one of the book’s best.) It chronicles a love affair between two cowboys over a twenty-year period. “The Half-Skinned Steer” was in John Updike’s Best American Short Stories of the Century, which makes me realize that, at this point, I usually like authors John Updike likes (as well as his work), but I usually disagree with the stories he picks. My pick from Close Range is “A Lonely Coast.” It has one of the best symbolic hooks I’ve read:

You ever see a house burning up in the night, way to hell and gone out there on the plains? Nothing but blackness and your headlights cutting a little wedge into it, could be the middle of the ocean for all you can see. And in that big dark a crown of flame the size of your thumbnail trembles. You’ll drive for an hour seeing it until it burns out or you do, until you pull off the road to close your eyes or look up at sky punched with bullet holes. And you might think about the people in the burning house, see them trying for the stairs, but mostly you don’t give a damn. They are too far away like everything else.

The year I lived in that junk trailer in the Crazy Woman Creek drainage I thought Josanna Skiles was like that, the house on fire in the night that you could only watch.

One of Proulx’s strengths is her word use. Either she’ll conjugate a word in a new or uncommon way or she’ll use a common word in an uncommon way. As a whole, the writing just feels right and there’s no need to run to the dictionary every page. She’s not abusing her lexicon just to sound smart. With that said, these obscure uses are not enough to keep the reader interested until the next word juke. Additionally, there’s a similarity to the stories (yeah, I know, they’re all about Wyoming and that style of life), but not in a good way. Often times, I found myself at the end of the page, realizing I didn’t absorb any of it, and was unwilling to go back and try again. Still, the stories that hit, hit well. Then again, maybe John Updike has a different opinion. Two stars.

[Clinton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just reread this, after I kept looking up, seeing it on the shelf, and thinking, "Man, I need to reread that."

There isn't a wasted word in this book. The stories are lean, visceral, and operatic. Her characters and plots surprise in the way that Flannery O'Connor's do, by spontaneous manifestations of grace and evil.

The collection begins and ends with two masterpieces: "The Half-Skinned Steer"--a tale of fate that uses an Icelandic legend--and "Brokeback Mountain," a love story that rings with doom reminiscent of Greek tragedy.

Wyoming is the central, reoccurring character: a hard, merciless, and miraculous landscape that serves (like Cormac McCarthy's border region) as a fitting backdrop for so many scenes of raw humanity.

Annie Proulx makes many contemporary writers look like they're not trying. This is how she opens this collection: "In the long unfurling of his life, from tight-wound kid hustler in a wool suit riding the train out of Cheyenne to geriatric limper in this spooled-out year, Mero had kicked down thoughts of the place where he began, a so-called ranch on strange ground at the south hinge of the Big Horns."

[Trin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Should actually be subtitled "Why Not to Live in Wyoming." Seriously, this is one of the most depressing collections of short stories I've ever encountered. Which is not to say they're not good, just that I'd kind of like to challenge Proulx to write a bit of light comedy or something.

"Brokeback Mountain" is the best, and I actually find the story much more evocative and powerful than the film. (Not that Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger making out is anything to sneeze at, mind.) Still, I'm glad I got a copy pre- tie-in cover and title change. I'm shallow, and I really hate that.

[Lucrezia · Rating 4 out of 5]

"La realtà non è mai un granché utile da queste parti" (Anonimo allevatore di bestiame)


Con queste laconiche parole poste ad epigrafe si apre questa raccolta di racconti di Annie Proulx. E trovo che non ve ne siano di più azzeccate per cominciare a parlarne.Invaghitami della copertina di questo libro (che ,ohimè, nella mia edizione, non è codesta, ma questa: http://shop.bcdeditore.it/images/P/88... . Che purtroppo ho trovato in versione micro , ma può essere riassunta come solitario e sperso cavallo ,ai bordi di un recinto, in mezzo alla neve) scoperto che era ambientato nel Wyoming (regione che mi ha sempre attratta irresistibilmente),che Annie Proulx è un premio Pulitzer (non mi prendete per snobbona , ma quasi tutti i Pulitzer che ho letto li ho amati alla follia) e che su uno di questi racconti ,e precisamente, "Gente del Wyoming" si basa lo splendido film di Ang Lee "I segreti di Brokeback Mountain" me ne sono appropriata immediatamente. Il libro è composto da 11 racconti :


-Il manzo scuoiato a mezzo: Non mi è piaciuto affatto , confusionario , frammentario. Sinceramente non ho ben capito dove la cara Annie volesse andare a parare, ho avuto anche qualche difficoltà ,all' inizio, a recuperarci un filo logico a causa dei frequenti flashback inseriti , e dei bruschi ritorni alla realtà senza preavviso... finale piuttosto scontato , niente di notevole, dunque ...


-Giù nel fango: In questo racconto ho iniziato veramente ad entrare nell' atmosfera del libro ,a percepire dove mi trovassi, osservando attraverso Diamond Felts l' ambiente duro e competitivo dei rodei , e la gente ,e il modo di vivere e pensare del Wyoming . Ecco , in questo racconto ho iniziato veramente a capire con chi avessi a che fare. E mi è piaciuto , e tanto , lo stile talvolta secco,scarno, quasi un pugno allo stomaco in alcune parti , accostato ad un lirismo estremo in alcuni punti. Ad esempio :
"Mentre viaggiava verso il baccano e i bagliori dell' arena a mezzogiorno pensò al vecchio cowboy che lustrava selle da trentasette anni , a Leecil che si allontanava nel tramonto canadese avvolto in una nube di zanzare , al bracciante del ranch che chino su un vitello gli apriva il sacco scrotale .Il fluire degli eventi dell' esistenza sembrava più lento del coltello ma non meno radicale."



-Storia di un lavoro: Breve racconto, scarno, quasi cronachistico, racconta le vicissitudini di una famiglia alla ricerca della terra promessa di un lavoro stabile, duraturo, e di una conseguente stabilità anche famigliare .

-La baia del sangue: Quattro paginette , troppo poche. Il meglio di se la Proulx lo tiene per i racconti più lunghi. Non ho notato niente di nuovo ed originale. E di fatti come dice la stessa Proulx : "Il racconto è una variazione del Wyoming sulla leggende popolare "The Calf That Ate The Traveler" In ogni caso gradevole da leggere.


-Chi è all' inferno vuole solo un sorso d' acqua: L' inzio di questo racconto è una delle pagine più belle di tutto il libro , un' altro mirabile esempio dello stile narrativo della Proulx :
"Stai lì pronto .Ombre di nuvole passano veloci sugli ammassi di rocce coloro cuoio come un film sullo schermo, proiettando al suolo una sorta di disgustosa eruzione cutanea marezzata .L' aria sibilla e non è la brezza locale , ma la grande , impetuosa ventata della rotazione terrestre. La regione selvaggia - aguzze cime bluastre , pianure erbose perenni, macigni caduti come città in rovina, la luminosa vastità del cielo -provoca un brivido dello spirito. è come una nota bassa che non può essere udita ma solo avvertita , è come un artiglio nelle viscere .Terra minacciosa e indifferente : per quella sua immutabilità le tragedie della gente non contano nulla , anche se i segni della sventura sono visibili ovunque. Non c' è massacro nè crudeltà del passato , non c' è incidente o assassinio che avvenga nei piccoli ranch oppure nei villaggi isolati ai crocevia con le loro esigue popolazioni di tre o diciassette persone , o nei campi spontanei di caravan delle città minerarie , che ritardi il diffondersi della luce mattutina .Recinti, bestiame , strade , raffinerie , miniere, cave di ghiaia , semafori , graffiti sui cavalcavia celebranti vittorie atletiche , croste di sangue sulla rampa di carico del Wal -Mart , corone di fiori di plastica sbiaditi dal sole sulla superstrada dov' è arrivata la morte , sono effimeri . Altre culture hanno piantato le tende qui e sono scomparse . Soltanto cielo e terra contano .Soltanto il diffondersi della luce mattutina ripetuto all' infinito . Cominci ad accorgerti che dio non ci deve molto , oltre a questo."


La storia di due famiglie e dei rispettivi figli e di come si possa scendere allo stesso livello delle bestie..


- L' erba al confine del mondo: Questa è la storia di una famiglia invece, ma in particolare di una figura Ottaline. Fonte di imbarazzo per la famiglia , perché grassoccia , non molto bella ma sopratutto goffa e un po eccentrica , Ottaline vorrebbe farsi una vita propria e a andarsene come la sorella, ma non vi riesce e rimane al ranch di famiglia. Sentendosi sola e frustata, la sua unica distrazione è intercettare e spiare chiamate altrui tramite lo scanner e intrattenersi in conversazioni , non si è ancora ben capito se reali o immaginarie, con un trattore. Finchè...


-Un paio di speroni: Romanzo breve , racconto lungo , diviso in capitoli , si parla ,dunque , di un paio di speroni, "nati sotto una cattiva stella" (la cometa di Hale Bopp) che portano sfortuna a chiunque li possieda , portandolo alla morte...


-Una costa solitaria: "Hai mai visto una casa bruciare di notte in un posto dimenticato da dio e dagli uomini, là nelle pianure? Niente altro che buoi totale e i tuoi fari si scavano un piccolo cuneo, per quel che vedi potrebbe essere pieno oceano. E nella profonda oscurità palpita una corona di fiamme grande quanto un' unghia. Guidi un' oretta finché si esaurisce o ti esaurisci tu , finché ti fermi sul ciglio della strada per chiudere gli occhi o alzarli al cielo bucherellato da fori di pallottole. Magari pensi alle persone nella casa che brucia , te le figuri mentre cercano di arrivare alle scale ma perlopiù non te ne frega niente. Sono troppo lontane come ogni altra cosa."
La parabola discendente di due donne, della protagonista e di una sua conoscente ,Josanna. Ma in particolare di quest' ultima che è attirata irresistibilmente verso le fiamme , e conseguentemente verso la propria distruzione...


I governatori del Wyoming: Potrete non crederci , l ho letto ieri sera , ma non mi ricordo assolutamente nulla , sfumato , come lo ho letto , puff! Scomparso , volatilizzato....

-A 55 Miglia dalla pompa di benzina : micro-racconto ritrae un Barbablù della prateria il cui motto è : "Se uno vive a casa del diavolo si diverte come può".

-Gente del Wyoming: OH! adesso veniamo al dunque , alla ciliegina sulla torta! Non mi stupisco che questo racconto sia stato messo a chiusura della raccolta... Questo racconto da solo meriterebbe 5 stelline , bellissimo , non mi stupisco ne sia stato tratto un film così bello (Quel vecchio volpone di Ang Lee!!).Non vi narro la storia perché molti di voi la conoscono già , e quelli che non la conoscono corrano a vedersi il film. Lascerò che sia il racconto a parlare (facendo un torto ai pezzi che non nominerò e che sono ugualmente belli, ma voi leggete tutto il racconto , non ve ne pentirete.) :
"Più in alto un ' incavo nel muro costituiva un piccolo nascondiglio e là, irrigidita da tutti gli anni in cui era rimasta appesa ad un chiodo , una camicia. La staccò dal chiodo. La vecchia camicia di Jack dei tempi di Brokeback. Il sangue sulla manica era invece il suo, un fiotto che gli era sgorgato dal naso nell' ultimo pomeriggio sulla montagna quando Jack , in uno dei loro contorsionistici corpo a corpo, gli aveva assestato una ginocchiata tosta. Poi, con la manica della camicia, Jack aveva cercato di fermare il sangue che schizzava dappertutto, inondandoli, ma il tampone non aveva tenuto perché di botto Ennis si era buttato giù dalla piattaforma stendendo l' angelo tutelare tra l'aquilegia le ali ripiegate. La camicia pareva pesante ma poi Ennis si accorse che all' interno ce n' era un' altra , con le maniche accuratamente infilate dentro quelle della camicia di Jack. La sua vecchia camicia scozzese persa tanto tempo prima, aveva creduto in qualche lurida lavanderia , la sua camicia sporca , con il taschino strappato , i bottoni saltati , rubata da Jack e nascosta là, dentro quella di Jack.Eccole là, come due pelli, una nell' altra , due in una. Affondò il volto nella stoffa aspirando lentamente con bocca e naso, sperando di trovarvi un debole residuo dell' odore di tabacco e artemisia, del sudore dolcigno e salato di Jack, ma non conservava un vero odore , solo il ricordo, il potere immaginato di Brokeback Mountain di cui restava solo ciò che reggeva fra le mani."

[federico garcía LOCA · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book made me a woman and then made me a man, and then made me feel like I was on the receiving end of an angry fist at a bar fight but also that I still had punches to throw myself. Violence + passion.

I don’t know what to say besides I miss camping and trekking a lot right now. I want to walk barefoot in the snow.
Or at least wake up in the cold, dry mountain air and smell a fire or the wet shade of a pine forest. I want to get in my car and drive all night all freakin night until the dawn happens somewhere far from here and I have to grab my hat from the wind. Somewhere you can feel ~the land~ and ~the wind~ and where there’s a creaky old attic, some dusty western place where coffee is made in blue ceramics that have turned black from use. I miss the sky in Texas. It’s different idc what they say.

The suffering and loneliness contained within these stories is a powerful brew...the barren and exposed humanity is not to be taken likely, but it is worth it.

[Joe S · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you already know why Annie Proulx rox ur fuckin face off, then I don't know why you're reading a review instead of the book itself. It's Annie Fuckin Proulx. Read it, you bastard.

Proulx gets away with all the shit that no one else could. A grab bag of voices, all unlikely, that switch mid-sentence; stories that end long after the first narrative arc dead-ended and long before the second gets off the ground; nonsensical lines that don't mean squat no matter how you squint but sure sound purdy.

She gets away with this because she's Annie Fuckin Proulx, she has the best sentence-level action since Henry James, every character is tenderly human and nothing, not one goddamn thing, is throw-away.

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

The short story "Brokeback Mountain" is a definite five star, however, the other stories did not have the same impact for me.