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Title: Close Range : Wyoming Stories by Annie Proulx ISBN: 0-684-85222-5 Publisher: Scribner Book Company Pub. Date: 10 February, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.75 (76 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Wyoming as a state of the soul
Comment: 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 still 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 that Annie Proulx weaves the English language beautifully, 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.
Rating: 5
Summary: Brutal and beautiful
Comment: The stories in Close Range are diverse and often grim. Buried within the grimness is a dry humor best exposed in "The Blood Bay" -- about a cowboy who finds a pair boots in the bitter Wyoming winter. "The Bunchgrass Edge of the World" is about a failing ranch family and their overweight daughter's quest to find a man. One of her suitors is a broke-down & vengeful tractor. On the grimmer side is "People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water," a story about a two families and the tragedy that strikes a member of one of them: Rasmussen, who gets mangled in a car wreck and returns home (brain damaged and scarred)to be taken care of by his parents. I read this while vacationing in Wyoming. At first, I thought that while the stories were brilliantly written, the characters she writes about surely couldn't exist. Then, as I drove through some of the places she wrote of & saw the people who lived there eating in small diners or driving by in battered pick up trucks, I understood that I was mistaken. These characters are alive & living in a world quite alien from the city life most of us know. Her language draws us into the world of red hoodoos, sagebrush, and winter storms where struggling alchoholic ranchers eek out a living while their children flee to cities and become vegetarians only to be replaced by Californians who move to Wyoming to live "the simple life." It's a hard and bitter world in which her characters inhabit, moving about it not realizing that they are ghosts and that the world has passed them by. Her knowledge of language and farm life is both astounding and at times frightening. This is what writing should be.
Rating: 3
Summary: A little too bleak for my taste ...
Comment: I'm not quite sure what to make of this collection. I loved AP's writing style and wanted to be drawn into the stories. However the problem was that once was I was in the stories I wasn't sure I wanted to be there - I found the subject matter a little too depressing - I had imagined stoical countryfolk living bleak but dignified lives against a magnificent, uncompromising landscape. Instead I was a little taken aback by the undignified and squalid behaviour of the charactors and how they all seem doomed to end up unhappy. Surely their are SOME happy marriages/parent-child relationships in this part of the world? I liked 'Brokeback Mountain' but the rest of the stories seemed a bit samey. I've never been to America but based on AP's view of it, I think I would give Wyoming a wide berth!
In some ways Ms Prolux reminds me of Thomas Hardy - the same tales of lives predestined to unhappiness against the uncaring splendour of nature - but unlike Hardy she appears to lack a sense of humour/or any compassion for her characters. Her characters have no nobility, hence it becomes difficult for the reader to empathise with their plight.
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Title: HEART SONGS AND OTHER STORIES by Annie Proulx ISBN: 0020360754 Publisher: Scribner Pub. Date: 17 March, 1995 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
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Title: Postcards by E. Annie Proulx, Annie Proulx ISBN: 068480087X Publisher: Scribner Pub. Date: 01 August, 1994 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: That Old Ace in the Hole : A Novel by Annie Proulx ISBN: 0743242483 Publisher: Scribner Pub. Date: 16 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: SHIPPING NEWS by Annie Proulx ISBN: 0671510053 Publisher: Scribner Pub. Date: 01 June, 1994 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: ACCORDION CRIMES by Annie Proulx ISBN: 0684831546 Publisher: Scribner Pub. Date: 17 June, 1997 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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