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475 of 492 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wyoming as a state of the soul, February 2, 2004
I am a grown-up, middle aged man not drawn much to sentimentality. I am not a practiced reader of fiction and I have spent only one night in Wyoming. I just finished reading the final story in the collection, "Brokeback Mountain",about ten minutes ago.
I still have tears in my eyes. It seems to me that I am falling out of a dream into the wet and chill February morning by San Francisco Bay where I now live. But the dream was of a place utterly familiar. I mean, emotionally familiar, familiar in memory, and evidently, familiar to my body. I can still feel the tingling just behind my cheekbones and the low-voltage electric discomfort in my chest. I guess Annie Proulx touched something in the geography of my own soul with her story. And even in the sadness that swirls around my eyes, I am grateful to her for that. And amazed that this woman could write so tellingly of men's hearts.
I said that I am a middle-aged man. So I have a history behind me. That's part of what makes you middle-aged. When you're young, who you want to be someday is the largest part of who you are. When you're middle-aged, the evidence begins to mount. The past is what it was and that is the largest part of who you are. It's harder to make believe anymore. And the story includes loss, confusion, missed opportunities, cowardice, fear, and memories of your own Brokeback Mountain. And sometimes the only redemption for the past, if it is redemption, is to remember it, fully. That's all.
Now that I am back in the waking world a bit more, I also want to say how beautifully Annie Proulx weaves the English language, with the kind of strength, color and contrapuntal roughness that makes it so earthy and satisfying. There were a few passages that I read out loud, just for the rhythm, the accents, the tumbled spring-thaw rush of sound. In a story about people not noted either for reflective insight or poetic diction, she has, paradoxically, by her own re-membering of them, let them be themselves, without apology, and yet re-situated them in a place of human grandeur.
I guess Aristotle had a point when he wrote about poetry as a moment of katharsis, of the compelling power of pity and fear. I bet he never thought he could find it on Brokeback Mountain.
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170 of 180 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Proulx will break your heart with that last story--, May 24, 2005
--but the rest of the collection is powerful, too. If you haven't read Proulx, pick this one up. It's rough, raw, brutally honest storytelling.
But honestly, I can't explain what it is about Brokeback Mountain that makes me pull the book off the shelf at least twice a year since it came out five years ago. It's got to be one of the most intensely moving stories I've ever read in my life.
Those men, their lives. The scattered, fragile moments where they do connect, like that scene on the front porch when they haven't seen each other in four years or that moment where he finds the flannel shirts. Kick me in the gut while you grab my heart and rip it to shreds. You'll love it, I promise.
I'm sure that some people unfamiliar with Proulx's work or this story will permit the film adaptation to become another banal symbol of those crazy gays taking over EVERYTHING--and deny themselves the pleasure of reading good, solid American fiction.
Regardless, do yourself a huge favor: read this story before seeing the film (fingers crossed).
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74 of 79 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I cried after reading this book, September 20, 2005
The first time I picked up Close Range: Wyoming Stories.
I thought MMm...Just another collection of boring stories about
white rural hicks. I've read stuff like this before. Usually set in the South. With the typical set of colorful charicters.
From the pompous upper crust to reddest of rednecks.
But I started reading. And kept on reading, for nine hours
strait!
I couldn't put it down. Annie Proulx is one powerful writer!
She made me rethink my attitudes about how rural folk lived.
Their lives are just as complex, mixed up and sad as us city dwellers are.
I chuckled at the first two or three stories. Felt empathy for
fourth. but it was the last story, Brokeback Mountain. That
one tore my heart out.
I ached for the charicters of Ennis and Jack. They lived in a
time that had no kind words for what were or how they felt about
each other. If they had lived 3000 years earlier or just 40 years later they could've been very happy together. But spending all those years apart. Only seeing each other maybe one or if they were lucky twice a year. Just made what they had even more bitter sweet. The ending had me in tears for three days, And I'm not the emotional type!
I've just ordered the audio version. and can't wait to
hear this wonderful book set to the spoken word.
Please, Please buy this book!
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