Bird Cloud: A Memoir [Hardcover]

Annie Proulx (Author)

Book Description

Release date: January 4, 2011

“Bird Cloud” is the name Annie Proulx gave to 640 acres of Wyoming wetlands and prairie and four-hundred-foot cliffs plunging down to the North Platte River. On the day she first visited, a cloud in the shape of a bird hung in the evening sky. Proulx also saw pelicans, bald eagles, golden eagles, great blue herons, ravens, scores of bluebirds, harriers, kestrels, elk, deer and a dozen antelope. She fell in love with the land, then owned by the Nature Conservancy, and she knew what she wanted to build on it—a house in harmony with her work, her appetites and her character, a library surrounded by bedrooms and a kitchen.

Proulx’s first work of nonfiction in more than twenty years, Bird Cloud is the story of designing and constructing that house—with its solar panels, Japanese soak tub, concrete floor and elk horn handles on kitchen cabinets. It is also an enthralling natural history and archaeology of the region—inhabited for millennia by Ute, Arapaho and Shoshone Indians— and a family history, going back to nineteenth-century Mississippi riverboat captains and Canadian settlers.

Proulx, a writer with extraordinary powers of observation and compassion, here turns her lens on herself. We understand how she came to be living in a house surrounded by wilderness, with shelves for thousands of books and long worktables on which to heap manuscripts, research materials and maps, and how she came to be one of the great American writers of her time. Bird Cloud is magnificent.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Brokeback Mountain portrays her flawed paradise in the majestic, hardscrabble West in this vibrant memoir. Proulx bought a 640-acre nature preserve by the North Platte River in Wyoming and started building her dream house, a project that took years and went hundreds of thousands of dollars over budget. In her bustling account, Proulx salivates over the prospect of a Japanese soak tub, polished concrete floor, solar panels, and luxe furnishings that often turn into pricey engineering fiascoes. The meticulous master builders she dubs the James Gang are the book's heroes. Though the house never quite lives up to its promise, it does inspire the author's engrossing natural history of the locale. Proulx drives cattle off of the overgrazed terrain; finds stone arrowheads; recounts the lore of the Indians, ranchers, and foppish big-game hunters who contested the land; and documents the antics of the eagles, magpies, mountain lions, and other critters who tolerate her presence. Like her fiction, Proulx's memoir flows from a memorable landscape where "the sagebrush seems nearly black and beaten low by the ceaseless wind"; the result is a fine evocation of place that becomes a meditation on the importance of a home, however harsh and evanescent. (Jan.) (c)
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From Bookmarks Magazine

Part memoir, part nature journal, part history, and part construction journal, Bird Cloud is, as the Boston Globe sums up, “a strange, disjointed, often beautiful book.” The first point many critics commented on was its curious timing given the foreclosure crisis. “There is a whiff of unexamined privilege” throughout, notes the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and most did not disagree. Yet whether in good taste or bad, that wasn’t the main point of contention. Reviewers generally agreed that Proulx is a master of capturing place, and her descriptions of the wild landscape held even naysayers’ interest. However, many thought the writing unrestrained and circuitous, with no sense of unifying story. In the end, Bird Cloud may offer the most for design lovers—and those with $3.7 million to spend, as the property is now up for sale.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Scribner; First Edition edition (January 4, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 9780743288804
• ISBN-13: 978-0743288804
• ASIN: 0743288807
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (47 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #389,132 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Annie Proulx's The Shipping News won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the National Book Award for Fiction, and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize. She is the author of two other novels: Postcards, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award, and Accordion Crimes. She has also written two collections of short stories, Heart Songs and Other Stories and Close Range. In 2001, The Shipping News was made into a major motion picture. Annie Proulx lives in Wyoming and Newfoundland.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

130 of 137 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars "The days were too short for complete happiness." January 3, 2011

By Michael J. Ettner

Format:Hardcover

It is common for a reader who enters an Annie Proulx novel or short story to find that it grows on you page by page, layer by layer, as her sure carpentry builds a fine and strong effect. That was my experience with the non-fiction "Bird Cloud." If in her best fiction Proulx carpenters untold stories into life, this new work finds Proulx retelling old stories, resurfacing tales of history, geology, geography, climate, biology. Her evident pleasure in doing so means that many readers will be pleased with the telling.

Take note of the book's cover, a photograph well-selected by Proulx herself, for it is a true harbinger of what the 234 pages inside will bring. It is not a mistake that you cannot see the house whose three-year construction (2004-2006) some publicity material and some reviews mistakenly suggest is the main subject of the book. You are right to imagine the sky and the rangeland extending to the horizon hold multitudes.

"Bird Cloud" is not a Wyoming version of "House," Tracy Kidder's 1985 book that meticulously recounted the planning, design and construction of a New England custom home. Proulx offers us no blueprints, no floor plans, no budget details, no additional photos. Yes, she parcels out a few practical "how-to's" and a selection of vignettes (mostly about construction snafus and disappointments), but the house-related material occupies less than half of the book's content.

The building is not where Proulx fixes her emotional energy. Her heart lies elsewhere: in side-tales about her family's genealogy; in stories of the "rapacity and venal grasping" of all too many of Wyoming's founders; in the terrible legacy of insults to the land, its game animals, its Indian inhabitants; in a child-like delight she takes in the "archeological possibilities" of her 640 acres; and in her experience of the raw power of nature at 7000 feet above sea level, where hurricane-force winds and isolation-inducing snowdrifts are routine. The book's emotional apogee is the final, and longest, chapter -- a narrative tracing an arc of 12 months through the lives of the site's abundant bird life. In these pages Proulx, an amateur as a birder but first-rate as a raconteur, unleashes a warm observational humor.

The book is vulnerable to two criticisms. One is that "Bird Cloud" lacks an overarching theme. It hosts lots of little stories but does not have a big story, and readers who demand a pointedly consistent narrative experience may be disappointed. Another criticism is that the book's subtitle -- "a Memoir" -- is misleading. That is true. This is not a "memoir" as that label is understood today, in our era of no-holds-barred confessional outpourings. Anyone expecting Proulx, a famously private author now in her eighth decade, to lay bare the intimacies of her personal diary, to expose her emotional core, or to explain, for example, how her three divorces have shaped the woman she is today, will come away empty-handed. Proulx is one author unlikely to appear on Oprah's couch.

If you see yourself as a potential reader of "Bird Cloud," consider first reading a rare and lengthy interview conducted at her Bird Cloud Ranch, published in the Spring 2009 issue of Paris Review. It is available for free online; just Google the three words, Paris Review Proulx. The interview is a useful companion piece, especially since "Bird Cloud" itself contains surprisingly little material about Proulx's writing habits.

A set of 24 color photos the property appear on the website of photographer Wayne Thom (Google the four words, Wayne Thom Bird Cloud). As of April, 2013, it appears the property is still available for purchase (Google "Bird Cloud Ranch" and Sale).

47 of 52 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Not what I expected December 30, 2010

By Laura

Format:Hardcover

I find the writing of Annie Proulx compelling; her characters are real and the settings ring true. This book is primarily her description of the process of building a very expensive custom house on a section in rural Wyoming and an abbreviated account of the history of the setting, the native peoples, and its wildlife. One gets to know something about Annie Proulx as a person by reading this book. It details her aesthetics, her love of the land, her response to frustration, her search for the "perfect home," and her naivete about construction. The tone is somewhat whiny, as the expenses mount up, the architect's vision is not practical, and she discovers that the county actually does not plow the road as far as her gate (she didn't confirm this before she bought the land and built the house.) Some sections read like a narrative of her birdwatching and wildlife spotting journal. If you want to know more about Ms. Proulx or if you do not know anything about the environmental history of Wyoming, you may find this interesting.

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Disappointed June 13, 2011

By LindaSLP

Format:Hardcover

Having read all of Annie Proulx's previous writings, I was expecting, I had to force myself through Bird Cloud. There were brief "hooks" when she began to describe the geology, the natural beauty, the wildlife, the weather. However, she lost me in the long passages about choosing cabinetry, the angst over flooring, the wish to build yet another house which was not too noisy, the need to catalog all her books, the need for a place that allowed her to plant a garden, the hardship of driving long distances to Whole Foods. I hope her next book dissects unnecessary consumption. I hope she analyzes the need for those with money to build in untouched places. Perhaps she could write a set of directions on how to live lightly and wisely.