- Paperback: 58 pages
- Publisher: Fourth Estate (1 Oct 1998)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 1857029402
- ISBN-13: 978-1857029406
- Product Dimensions: 18.3 x 12.4 x 1 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 49,345 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
Winner of the US National Magazine Award following its publication in The New Yorker in 1997, Annie Proulx's novella Brokeback Mountain follows her international success with The Shipping News and Accordian Crimes, confirming her status as one of the most powerful and accomplished voices in contemporary American fiction. With remarkable economy of style, Proulx traces the story of a "pair of deuces going nowhere", Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar, two ranch hands brought together in the desolate, beautiful landscape of Wyoming.
Herding sheep together on Brokeback Mountain in the spring of 1963, Ennis and Jack's companionability gradually develops into an intense sexual intimacy, much to the apparent surprise of both men. Proulx presents a devastating study of Jack and Ennis' subsequent struggle with both their families and their work as they try to come to terms with their sexual relationship--as it develops alongside their studiedly macho world of drinking, fighting, horses and rodeos, which are brought vividly, and often humorously to life.
In exploring the intimacies and sexual pleasures emerging from this masculine world, Proulx captures with terrible poignancy the destruction and isolation which comes from both men's disavowal of their homosexual desire, a dilemma which is movingly described in the novella's tragic denouement. Looking back on his doomed relationship with Jack Twist, Ennis del Mar reflects:
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.Brokeback Mountain is a remarkable exploration of the convergence of pain and isolation at the point where desire and disavowal come together between men. Annie Proulx once again at her best. --Jerry Brotton
Product Description
The author won the Pulitzer Prize as E. Annie Proulx for her novel The Shipping News. As just Annie Proulx, Brokeback Mountain is her astonishing new work of fiction. Barely 10,000 words long it nevertheless encompasses a world and two lives.
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 – ‘drop-out country boys with no prospects, brought up to hard work and privation, both rough-mannered, tough spoken’ – 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, something deadly. In twenty years they grab just a few desperate meetings, grace only in the memory of ‘that old, cold time on the mountain when they owned the world and nothing seemed wrong.’
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A mountaintop experience,
By Kurt Messick "FrKurt Messick" (London, SW1) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER) (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: Brokeback Mountain (Paperback)
I recall a short story version of Brokeback Mountain many years ago in a major periodical (alas, I can't recall the periodical). I had an idea that it would, in the fullness of time, become a major motion picture, and that it has. It is an award-winning film already, and looks set for some sort of Oscar recognition. However, in the hype surrounding the film, those interested would be wise to look at the book. There is much more depth here than in the film, much more about the interior workings of the main characters and what they must endure. This is ultimately not a love story, as the marketing has been spinning the film, but rather an expose on the dangers and drawbacks of living in the closet. For the purposes of this story, Annie Proulx has juxtaposed two diametrically opposite cultures in the American psyche - the gay culture and the cowboy culture (although history is, as it often is, in fact rather different from what the Hollywood-created current remembrance of it is). One comes to wonder at the resistance that all characters seem to have for breaking free of their bonds; ultimately, none of the relationships are satisfying, and there is an emotional desolation as wide and spare as brush land and prairies of the American West. The lead characters meet while working for the summer as wranglers and watchers over herds. They form a bond that renews at regular intervals during their lives, lives that go on to other, more traditional and socially acceptable settings. Each gets married, each has children, each embarks (in one way or another) in a working life that would seem to preclude the other, but yet the tie that binds them draws them together again on a regular basis. The closet theme is heightened in the lead characters, but in fact serves as a metaphor for readers who might not fit in that particular closet - we all have skeletons in our closets, it seems, and in fact, we all have our own closets in which we hide and live out part of our lives. Annie Proulx is an excellent writer, and even though I find it occasionally difficult to relate to her main characters (being involved in worlds several removes away from mine), I can still understand the themes of longing, despair, disappointment, and yes, love, too.
19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An amazing and a heart wrenching story,
By
This review is from: Brokeback Mountain (Paperback)
truly a masterpiece. i have read Annie Proulx's 'The Shipping News' and i always thought that she was an outstanding writer but Brokeback Mountain does the trick. she is at her best. the story is very touching and makes you want to read more and more and not let the story stop. annie proulx deserves true appalause in successfully bringing out a gay themed story revolving around two cowboys back in the 1960s. a very well-written story and it definetely pulled my heart strings.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brokeback will "get you good",
This review is from: Brokeback Mountain (Paperback)
Whilst being set resolutely in America's west and telling the story of two ranch hands, don't dismiss this wonderful novella as a gay cowboy story. This spare and uncompromising tale of an enduring, yet ultimately unfulfilled love and passion that spans 20 years is a universal one that challenges the reader to explore their views about duty, trust, love and desire within a society that has dictated what is acceptable and what is not, as the two main characters live out their single, disappointing lives. In Ennis and Jack I discovered what it is like to love and yearn for something and someone you can never have and was left asking the question, would I want to have such a grand passion in my life if the cost was such emptiness and longing? Such a love takes these two vibrant and hopeful young men and ultimately makes 'ghosts' of them both. Achingly sad. Beautifully and sparingly told. Annie Proulx delivers a masterclass in short story writing. Don't miss it!
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