Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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31 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
captivating, tragic, simply incredible story, 23 Dec 2005
Before buying this book, after being told about the film, I wasn't aware of how short it was...One thing I regret about this book is it's length. It's such a magical and well told story that I only wish it was much longer, maybe even as long as a normal novel. Annie Proulx tells a wonderful story about forbidden desire and love which is so heart wrenchingly real and genuine that you just wish it went on for longer and that it wasn't just a "short story." I'm now really looking forward to the film adaption which is set to be an instant classic, the cast looks amazing and the acting also. I love this story!
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Powerful and heart-breaking, 7 Jan 2006
This is an incredibly subtle, evocative and moving account of two ranch hands in 1960's America who are thrown together in ordinary circumstances and who very quickly discover they share something that runs so deep that it virtually consumes them, a connection and affection that only intensifies through the years. And this story is made all the more powerful by the succinct prose and almost sparse, but vibrant language. At only 58, small pages and because the two main characters, Jack and Ennis, and their story is so fascinating - this is a book that you’ll very likely finish in one sitting. Everything works here, but most essentially- the two men at the centre of the story who are more different than they are alike, but who compliment each other perfectly- makes for a very undemanding, but intensely involving and ultimately bittersweet story. And most refreshingly, Proulx never patronises her readers- predictable plot twists and tidy, happy endings don't apply here. It's almost as if she isn't aware she's writing for anyone other than herself, she simply lays out a story to be taken or not and I'm very glad I did. In some ways, this is a story that the reader must add a lot to themselves, because all love is unspoken here, between people not used to expressing themselves or their feelings openly, even those between husband and wife, so some reading between the lines is required. And ultimately, the story was very powerful for me because it highlighted just how few boundaries life imposes on us, but how very many we impose on ourselves.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Nitty-gritty, 24 Mar 2006
Previous reviewers here have not always made it clear that it is a collection of eleven stories, of which "Brokeback Mountain", representing just thirty-five pages, is the last. The collection was originally published as "Close Range: Wyoming Stories", and, to tie in with the movie, has been reissued and retitled "Close Range/Brokeback Mountain and other stories", with, of course, cover photographs of Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal against a backdrop of scenery from the Ang Lee movie.
The majority of readers will come to this volume, as I did, having already seen the film, and so turn straight to page 283. The story "Brokeback Mountain" is quickly recognizable as the inspiration behind the film, and is as such doubtless the best introduction to Annie Proulx's complex and brilliantly dense prose-style. Some of the dialogue in the film comes directly from that in the story, while other elements feature in the narrative part. For example: "the brilliant charge of their infrequent couplings was darkened by the sense of time flying, never enough time, never enough." [In the film, the words "never enough time, never enough" are spoken by Jack Twist.]
Despite the easily recognisable overall situation, reading the short story is, of course, a significantly different experience from watching the film. The female characters generally speaking feature relatively little in the story, and Jack's first meeting with his wife is absent, for example, as is the Thanksgiving confrontation between Jack and his father-in-law. However, there are also elements in the story which were left out of the movie, a particularly unsettling one being a late revelation about the conflict between Jack and his father, glossed over in the movie when Jack briefly mentions that his father never had any time for him. What is related in the story is considerably more disturbing.
As for the other ten stories, ranging in length from just one page to something over forty, my personal feeling is that the longer ones are the better ones [and that the one-page one hardly qualifies to be included in the first place...] But Proulx writes brilliantly throughout, sometimes with acerbic humour [one female character is "distinguished by a physique approaching the size of a hundred-gallon propane tank"; there are "women with eyebrows like crowbars" and men with "knuckles the size of new potatoes"]. Fans of the movie coming in search of more gay cowboys will, I'm afraid, be disappointed, but there is plenty here dealing with the darker side of human hearts and psyches, and some very dark moments indeed. As one of the character-narrators puts it, human emotions are fuelled by "...the little running grass-fires of the heart, the kind that usually die out on their own but in some people soar into uncontrollable conflagration." Which applies aptly to Ennis and Jack. More generally, though, it is those uncontrollable conflagrations and their devastating consequences which make all these stories what they are. Be warned: they are difficult - but they are unforgettable.
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