Brokeback Mountain [Import] [Paperback]

Annie Proulx (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 58 pages
• Publisher: Fourth Estate; First Edition edition (1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1857029402
• ISBN-13: 978-1857029406
• Product Dimensions: 7.2 x 4.9 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #780,279 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.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

153 of 157 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Review of Brokeback Mountain by Cheri, June 26, 2004

By 

Cheri Crystal (Eastern United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Brokeback Mountain (Paperback)

Annie Proulx, a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist, packs a tremendous amount of information and incredible prose in 58 short pages. Brokeback Mountain is a heart-wrenching, gritty novella about two tough ranch hands who meet on a job, and, inexplicably, fall in love. These stoic, impecunious, high-school dropouts, who live rough lives, are desperately in need of work. Both Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist sign up with Farm and Ranch Employment and end up herding for the same sheep operation on Brokeback Mountain.

Ennis is engaged to be married when he meets Jack and does not consider himself queer. Neither does Jack. The two men embark on an intimacy that they feel is their own business, as long as it isn't hurting anybody else. It's just sex between two, lonely, horny, guys and it means nothing. When the summer is over and they part, Ennis feels horrible about leaving Jack. If, what they had together meant nothing, then why can't Ennis shake the bad feeling separation brings?

Ennis and Jack lose track of each other for four years and are reunited as married men with children. The love affair picks up where it left off during that summer on Brokeback Mountain. They share a forbidden love, sweeter than each man has with his wife, but, actions against conventional relationships could prove to be deadly. Cowboys, even tough ones, who admitted to being gay, were often tortured and murdered. Jack wants to have a life with Ennis and start up a ranch with him. Ennis is neither ready nor willing to give up his heterosexual lifestyle, even if he does love Jack

The detail with which Proulx describes the setting puts the reader in the mountains of Wyoming, surrounded by meadows, sheep, coyotes, and the expansive sky. You can smell the horses, campfire, beer, and cigarettes as Ennis and Jack sit around at night trading stories and getting to know each other. You can feel the exhaustion of the back-breaking work of tending sheep. Proulx delights the reader with accounts of every feeling, scent, and action. The dialect is precise and the text is never tedious or boring; it simply enriches the story as vitamins enrich food. With narration like this, the reader knows exactly what is going on and is transported into every nuance of the story.

Annie Proulx is in the same class as John Steinbeck and Mark Twain, in my humble opinion. I cannot stress enough how well written this book is, or what a gut wrenching story it is but I can stress how highly I recommend reading this book. My only complaint is that it is too short. Do not miss reading Brokeback Mountain. Soon, it will be made into a major motion picture, which I hope will be true to the book.
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56 of 60 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "You Just Shot My Airplane Out A The Sky", September 7, 2005

By 

H. F. Corbin "Foster Corbin" (ATLANTA, GA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Brokeback Mountain (Paperback)

In 1963 Jack Twist, with buckteeth "not pronounced enough to let him eat popcorn out of the neck of a jug, but noticeable," and Ennis del Mar, "scruffy and a little cave-chested," herd sheep for the summer on Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming country. Both men are under twenty, both high school dropouts, both "rough-mannered, rough-spoken, inured to the stoic life." These men fall hopelessly in love that summer and their lives are forever changed. Pulitzer prize winning author Annie Proulx in language as understated as Dante's ("that day they read no further") describes their first coupling: "in a little while they deepened their intimacy considerably."

Their dilemma, which provides the central conflict of this perfect story, is whether to leave wives and children and live together in fictional Wyoming-- forty years before the true life tragedy of Matthew Shepherd-- or to seek each other out in secret when they have the time over the passing years. They are well aware of the inherent danger of expressing their love before the world. Ennis: "We do that in the wrong place we'll be dead. There's no reins on this one. It scares the p--- out of me." Jack: "It don't happen in Wyomin [sic] and if it does I don't know what they do, maybe go to Denver. . . come on, Ennis, you just shot my airplane out a the sky -- give me somethin a go on."

I have read this story three times now and with each new reading pick up nuances I missed previously. Ms. Proulx has created here two characters who will tear your heart out; you remember them long after you finish reading. Ms. Proulx is quite a marvelous story-teller, writing about the redeeming power of love and the comfort of memory. Her language is as tough and beautiful as the Wyoming country. Near the end of her story, there is a poignant scene where Ennis finds his old shirt that Jack had stolen hanging inside one of Jack's own: "He pressed his face into the fabric and breathed in slowly through his mouth and nose, hoping for the faintest smoke and mountain sage and salty sweet stink of Jack but there was no real scent, only the memory of it, the imagined power of Brokeback Mountain of which nothing was left but what he held in his hands."

This story deserves more than five stars.

35 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A romance as sparse and beautiful as the prairie, September 23, 2004

By 

Amperage (Louisiana, United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Brokeback Mountain (Paperback)

Brokeback mountain is a sparsely worded book. Poulx wastes no words, choosing to tell this a story the way her characters would want it told. It is what a romance should be--the tale of a love between two people that is so overwhelming that no matter what rules and laws and societal mores exist to destroy that love the lovers cannot do anything but love another. Hopelessly, desperately, no matter what the consequences, her cowboys love one another.

The great tragedy of her story is not in a murder or a revolution or any other deus ex machina that Hardy would've relied upon, but in the simple seperation and denial of love between two men because the structure of the world these men live in. And yet it is a greater tragedy than any the Brontes ever dreamed up.

I was not expecting the sudden onslaught of tears that assaulted me when I finished this thin little book, and set it down. I did not know until after I was finished reading how deeply this story had affected me. I did not treasure the words or the times spent between the two lovers as I should have (which is perhaps the way it should be) until I was finished with the book and found myself weeping over two men who should have been the lucky ones to find great love in one another.