"Те бяха израсли в малки, бедни ферми в два противоположни края на щата. Джак Туист в Лайтнинг флет, горе на границата с Монтана, Енис Дел Мар в околностите на Сейдж, близо до Юта, и двамата бяха изоставили училището, провинциални момчета, без изгледи за бъдеще, отгледани за тежка работа и лишения, и двамата с недодялани маниери и груб език, закалени за суров начин на живот..."

Не обичам да чета книги с гей тематика, но този разказ на Ани Пру, носител на "Пулицър" за Shipping News, минава отвъд всякакви клиширани представи за любовта и страстта.
Гледала съм филма много пъти и винаги ме разтърсва. Смятах, че разказът може би е по-слаб, но не е така. Тези двама младежи, които не са получили обич и разбиране от никого, бедни, без изгледи за по-добро бъдеще из фермите на Уайоминг в Американския юг, преживяват нещо толкова силно, че не знаем как да го наречем - страст, любов, дружба, дълбока близост. Енис Дел Мар не е хомосексуален, но Джак е единственият човек, който докосва сърцето му, преобръща живота му и може би го разрушава. А може би не. Неведоми са пътищата на човешкото сърце.
Препоръчвам!

I think it’s taken me this long to read Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain because the movie left such an indelible imprint on my mind that I didn’t want to have the story told again until its memory had faded a little - otherwise the two tend to blur together and I’m also a reader who craves novelty so I don’t like to read the same story over and over.

And the movie has made its mark on popular culture, for good reason - it really is an amazing work of art. But for anyone who isn’t familiar with the story, it’s about two Wyoming ranchers - Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist - who fall in love and have a tumultuous and doomed affair that lasts several years until society’s prejudices put an abrupt end to it.

One of the many remarkable things Proulx accomplishes is how much she’s able to put into a short story. There’s not a bit of fat to it and yet you get as much as you would from a full-length novel. There’s so much passion and intensity in the scenes, from when Ennis and Jack first tumble together, to the scene where Ennis’ ex-wife Alma confronts Ennis, to Jack’s increased frustrations at not being able to be with Ennis completely - the story starts with the two men meeting as young men not yet twenty years old in 1963 and ends in the early ‘80s; suffice it to say, attitudes towards homosexuality were not the same as they are today.

The dialogue is exceptional, not least because it conveys the characters perfectly, as well as sounding real. As good as Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal’s performances are in the Ang Lee movie, it doesn’t feel like they had to imagine much - the characters are there on the page. Ennis’ laconic speech, often giving way to physical expression, and Jack’s fiery words. “This ain’t no little thing that’s happenin here” is a standout line, but there’s a reason the line that’s entered popular culture, now and forever, is “I wish I knew how to quit you.” In the context of the story, it’s devastating, but also beautifully captures what love is and what it does to us. It’s pure poetry.

I always suspected this story would be good but I wasn’t prepared for how powerful it is. That ending… This really has to be one of the best romance stories ever written. One thing I didn’t remember from the movie - and the movie is such a faithful adaptation of the source material that it all came flooding back as I was reading - is the explanation for why Ennis only hugs Jack from behind, and it’s such a tragic indictment of the time and world they lived in.

I couldn’t have been more impressed with every single aspect of the story - I loved reading this emotional freight train and wish I’d read it sooner. It’s up there with John Steinbeck’s shorter works like Of Mice and Men. I can’t recommend it higher - it’s the pinnacle of literary art. I try not to use this word often because it should mean something but this story completely deserves it: Brokeback Mountain is a masterpiece.

I've never seen the movie of this, so I went in with no preconceptions, and I loved it. It was beautiful, tender and oh-so heartbreaking, and the writing was exquisite.

I listened to the audiobook, narrated by Campbell Scott, and would thoroughly recommend it.

The shirts actually ruined me.

I wish this had been longer and more detailed, so perhaps that in itself indicates a 5 star short story?

Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain is often hailed as a groundbreaking tale of forbidden love, a poignant exploration of masculinity, and a searing critique of societal norms. But when we cut through the romanticized haze, we can call it what it really is: a brutal, unflinching excavation of human loneliness, wrapped in the myth of the American West. This isn’t a love story—it’s a tragedy of repression, a slow-motion car crash of two lives doomed by the weight of their own silence.

Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, two men so shackled by their own internalized sexuality and societal expectations that their love becomes a prison rather than a liberation. Their relationship is less a romance and more a series of stolen moments, furtive and desperate, like animals gnawing at their own limbs to escape a trap.

The Infamous line: “I wish I knew how to quit you.” It’s been quoted ad nauseam, plastered on Tumblr blogs and Instagram captions, stripped of its raw, ugly power. But in context, it’s not a declaration of eternal love—it’s a cry of frustration, a confession of helplessness. Ennis and Jack don’t know how to quit each other because they don’t know how to live without the pain. Their love is a wound they keep reopening, a reminder of what they can never truly have.

Proulx doesn’t let anyone off the hook—not her characters, not her readers, and certainly not the society that forces men like Ennis and Jack to live in the shadows. The story is a gut punch, that love alone is never enough to overcome the weight of prejudice, fear, and self-loathing. It’s a story that refuses to offer easy answers or happy endings, and that’s what makes it so damn uncomfortable—and so necessary.

So, no, Brokeback Mountain isn’t a “beautiful love story.” It’s a raw, unrelenting examination of the cost of living a lie. It’s a story that forces us to confront the ways we’re complicit in perpetuating systems of oppression, even as we root for Ennis and Jack to find their way to each other. And it’s a story that lingers, like a bruise you can’t stop pressing…Love it or hate it, you can’t ignore it. And maybe that’s the point.

4.3/5

Sure, I'd seen the movie, and until recently owned a copy of the book with Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal on the cover, which was published to coincide with the release of the movie. I gave the book away without ever having read it—I'd scanned the pages for the sexy bits and was unimpresssed—and secretly considered myself immune to the power of Annie Proulx's words. I was wrong. She packs a fuckin' punch really is the most appropriate way to express it—and some of her turns of phrase are surprisingly hilarious simply because she minces no words. The death with which the story concludes isn't even the devastating part. I mean it is, but it's the what comes after—the regret and the might-have-beens, the longing for what was and can never be again—that really tightens the throat. Consider me even gayer than I was before, and all thanks to a straight woman.

n  "Ennis pulled Jack's hand to his mouth, took a hit from the cigarette, exhaled. "Sure as hell seem in one piece to me. You know, I was sittin up here all that time tryin to figure out if I was—? I know I ain't. I mean, here we both got wives and kids, right? I like doin it with women, yeah, but Jesus H., ain't nothin like this. I never had no thoughts a doin it with another guy except I sure wrang it out a hunderd times thinkin about you. You do it with other guys, Jack?"

"Shit no," said Jack, who had been riding more than bulls, not rolling his own. "You know that. Old Brokeback got us good and it sure ain't over. We got to work out what the fuck we're goin a do now?""n

Well I thought this was just fantastic. It finds a home on my "sad and lovely" shelf because that's just what it is. I actually wrote a comprehensive review of this but I read it over and decided to go with a heart-over-head decision, and am instead just gonna write a brief post of my impressions immediately upon finishing, because in the end it's the feeling of it less than the thing itself that is most powerful.

I'm left with this feeling of nostalgia mixed up with longing and sadness and half-remembered joy, freedom, but a locked-in feeling too, and it all feels a little like waking up from a dream where life is perfect to a world where it isn't, and you want to think more about the dream but by the time you have your morning coffee it's gone, who knows where, faded fast and you didn't even know it. And of course you're sad because you came so close to unspeakable joy and you couldn't quite get your fingers around it, but maybe you look at your world a little differently too, things seem a little stranger and a little farther away. You think it's gone for good but someday farther in the future than you would've guessed, a smell on the wind or a similar dream or the light falling a certain way sparks up that feeling again, that nostalgia-longing-joy-sadness, always strong and fleeting, sometimes so sudden it damn near knocks the wind right out of you, it's like going to a foreign country and meeting a long-lost relative you thought was dead. It's hard to put this feeling into words, this dream comedown or longing for a time to which you can never return; I myself have never even talked about it with other people and can only assume they've felt it too. Brokeback Mountain is steeped in this feeling, and for the life of me I can't figure out how Annie Proulx got it just right but I don't care to analyse too much more than that. It's a feeling that's not particularly pleasant, in fact it can hurt more than meaner and more solid types of hurt, but I'm glad I've experienced it on occasion all the same, and I'm left with the nagging suspicion that somehow life would be much worse without its presence.

I saw Brokeback Mountain when I was quite young (my mom changed channels when a sex scene came on like she always did) and I have to say, it sorta blew my mind. Gay was not a word I heard, unless someone in my class was teasing someone or something. I grew up in the Irish countryside so I was quite sheltered until I was at least 15/16 (hmm, same year we got Wi-Fi). But as a 12 year old, to be "gay" meant something bad and dirty and I never understood why. Nobody could give me an acceptable answer as to why it was wrong but I was afraid to question things so I just went with it. When I watched this, I remember that seed of doubt that was already there in my mind being watered a bit. The two cowboys really loved each other, in their own way and I could see nothing wrong with it. Looking back, this film was the first thing to really open my eyes to what it was like to be gay.

I've been meaning to read the book for a while now and it definitely lived up to my expectations. It is so short but it packs so many emotions into it; it really is incredible. I'm always impressed when an author can pack so much into a short story without hindering any other element. This story is beautiful, tragic, heart-breaking and heart-warming. It makes you wish that things were different for Ennis & Jack. I really enjoyed it and I would love to read more stories like this one.

I was unsure about the writing style at the start but when I got into it, I really liked it. I would definitely recommend this and I would read more by Annie Proulx.

That's fine. I didn't need my heart anyway.

This book is like a punch in the gut. I never thought that a short story could have such an impact on me. This isn’t simply a book about two cowboys falling in love: this is the heartbreaking tale of Jack and Ennis who love each other, but deny it not only because they’re afraid of the outside world, but also of their own feelings.
America in the 1960’s wasn’t a safe place for homosexuals after all, and if society can’t accept them, how can they accept themselves? That emotional struggle makes this book so heart-wrenching, because both men know their love for each other is real. It just can’t happen. And that tears them apart.

[Jack:] “You have no fuckin idea how bad it gets. I’m not you. I can’t make it on a couple a high-altitude fucks once or twice a year. You’re too much for Ennis, you son of a whoreson bitch. I wish I knew how to quit you.”

Maybe this story hits so much harder because the books I read earlier featured happy LGBT-characters. Where young transgender Stella gets the full support of her mother (The Sunlight Pilgrims) and Simon’s coming out is met with positive reactions (Simon Vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda), Jack and Ennis’s (love) life is anything but happy and easy. They were two masculine men living in prejudice Wyoming during the sixties, a place where young Ennis saw an old rancher being tortured to death for being gay. This was not uncommon back then, and times haven’t really changed for the better.
Because although the world is slowly getting more accepting of gay love, still so many LGBT-people are getting harassed, kicked out, or physically and/or emotionally abused because of who they love. Don’t get blinded by the Pride Parades or the legalisation of same-sex marriage in America: the world is still a cruel place for many.

This is why I think Brokeback Mountain is a must read for fans of LGBT-books, to get that reality check. To other readers I’d also recommend this book, because for a book with only 60 pages, this short story packs a powerful punch. The prose is concise and the writing style rough, but it suits the characters and their story.

5 stars for this heart-breaking little book, which I won’t forget soon.

This is the first audio book I've 'read'. It was much more akin to listening to a radio play than sitting reading a book. There was no effort involved and by the nuancing of the narrator the book was interpreted for me. It was fast-paced, no time to sit and ponder a paragraph, no natural break between chapters just a pause. I can't say I enjoyed it, it felt fake, it felt like cheating, it felt like the dumbed-down version - all the work done for me and no need to particularly concentrate either, in fact I played spider solitaire and tetris while I was 'reading' the book. I can only think I would use this format again for a book I had to read but couldn't get through.

I find that reading a book, I really concentrate on it, nothing else around me exists, I enter the world of the writer, I might stop and think about what I'm reading once in a while, reread a particularly difficult or beautifully-written paragraph and even enjoy the way book is laid-out, the font, the margins, the spacing, the look of paragraphs on the page, and of course the feel of the paper (I like thick, creamy hardback book pages).

Last year I kept a list on a Goodreads thread of a 100-book a year challenge. I could see with audio books, I could easily increase the number of books I've 'read', but it would feel to me the same as including children's books, too easy an option.

This is only my experience. Others think of audio books in quite different ways and thoroughly enjoy them. I had hoped I would, but nope, I just wasn't feelin' it at all. I would quite like to 'read' an audio book along with someone who enjoys them, a chapter at a time and see if I could get more from it than I had alone.

To move on to a review of the book itself - I found the prose, described by almost everyone to be 'spare' as the opposite, overly descriptive, but this could be the media, perhaps written it reads quite differently. I feel any review of the book is a review of the way the narrator chose to interpret it and not the book itself, so I'm going to end by saying, I enjoyed the book, but not a lot and I enjoyed the media not much at all.

ANNIE PROULX bei jos KUPROTAS KALBAS. Kai vienas vaikinas pamilsta kitą vaikiną. Ir pasaulis jiems nesišypso. Nors diskutuotina.

Prieš daug metų pažiūrėjau filmą. Nežinojau, kad egzistuoja knyga, pagal kurią buvo parašytas scenarijus. Konkreti ir labai taikli novelė apie dviejų asmenų meilę vienas kitam, užgimusią kiek atokiau nuo miestelio, jų gyventojų bei labai jau įpareigojančios aplinkos.

Kai gavau į rankas knygą, nustebau. Maniau, kad tai didelės apimties kūrinys, kuris ekranizacijoje man pasirodė turtingas ir labai prasmingas. Kaip tiek daug sutalpinti į tiek mažai. Veiksmas vyksta greit ir pakankamai padrikai. Bet ir vėlgi, ne kūrinio apimtyje ir greitume glūdi visa esmė.

Labai vieniši, sukaustyti baimės, alkani ir ilgesingi, atrandantys, bet nuolatos prarandatys, jaunčiantys gėdą, tačiau užsimirštantys maloniomis akimirkomis. Koks klimatas buvo tuomet ir koks klimats yra šiuo metu, kas panašaus tarp „anksčiau“ ir „dabar“. Taip, dabar geriau, patogiau, drąsiau – ne taip vieniša, ne taip baisu, ne taip liūdna. Anksčiau galėjai mirtį už tai, kas es ir kad esi. Buvo sunku jiems, buvo sunku plačiai visuomenei, bet lygiai taip pat buvo sunku ir moterims. Atsiprašau, kad kurį laiką teko slėptis už Jūsų ir su Jumis.

Prisiminiau labai daug detalių, kurias buvau užmiršęs. Tarsi kino filmo nebūčiau matę - po išsiskyrimo scenos daugiau nieko neįvyko. Perskaičius, vadinkim, antrąją istorijos dalį naujomis akimis. Viskas žavesys yra detalėse. Marškiniuose esantis netikėtumas, nuotraukoje slypinti prasmė, grubumas, atžagarumas, aistra, ašaros, žvilgsnis, trumpi dialogai, prisilietimai, ilgesiu paremti sprendimai.

Ištaikiau progą. Rekomenduoju ištaikyti progą ir Jums. Kol kas tai giliai įsišaknijusi meilės istorija, iki šiol gyvuojantis prisiminimas bei priminimas, kaip viskas gali būti blogiau. Ir kas yra meilė. Gyvenkime laimingai, gyvenkime dabar.

Lo leí en apenas unas horas. La película es súper fiel a la historia en la que se inspiró y esto me sorprendió. La forma de escribir de Annie Proulx es maravillosa, algo que no había visto antes, pues en unas pocas frases te describe una serie de situaciones de forma directa y concisa sin adentrarse tanto en los detalles y sin quitarle profundidad a la trama o a los personajes.

Le película, en mi opinión, es una obra de arte cinematográfica, con una de las historias más conmovedoras que haya visto. Y, debo decir, está a la altura de portentosa historia que nos relata Proulx en sus pocas páginas.

Absolutamente maravilloso.