Ugh. Depressing and ugly. The characters in each of these short stories certainly give no hope for mankind. Wyoming can be a hard place. I lived there, raised my kids there, for 12 years, but the people can be beautiful just like anywhere. This doesn't at all represent my Wyoming experience or most people that I know.

I don't often read short stories but I enjoyed these. At the risk of sounding sexist Annie Proulx does not write like a woman, and I really enjoy her work.

Wyoming, Wyoming.

Lyhyt kantama ei välttämättä ole ihan kaikista omaperäisin novellikokoelma, mutta siinä oli paljon asioita mistä pidin: ajasta jälkeen jääneitä karjapaimenia, ylenmääräistä rujoutta ja satunnaista yliluonnollisuutta.

Keskeisintä kokoelmassa on kuitenkin sen miljöö ja sen tunnelma. Tätä voisi varmaan sanoa "Rocky Mountain Gothiciksi", sen verran paljon tuntuu Flannery O'Connorin kaikuja. Novellit kuvaavat Wyomingia eri aikoina ja erilaisista näkökulmista, mutta jatkuvasti sama synkeän väkivaltainen henki on taustalla. Proulxin taidoista kertoo myös se, että kertojaratkaisu on useita erilaisia ja mikään niistä ei tunnu huonolta valinnalta.

Yleinen tunnelma on Lyhyen kantaman keskeisin ansio, mutta onhan novelleila omat tarinalliset ansionsakin. Karuinta meininkiä edustavat "Yksinäinen rannikko" ja "Wyomingin kuvernöörit" maalavat hyvin kuvan siitä mikä on jäänyt ajasta jälkeen. Rodeocowboysta kertova "Maan muta" yhdistää hyvin romantiikan ja groteskin. "Puoleksi nyljetty härkä" taas tuo esiin sellaista ilkikurista luovuutta mitä muussa kokoelmassa ei niin paljoa väläytellä.

Mutta siis kokoelman paras novelli on silti "Brokeback Mountain". Rujo tarina kahdesta karjapaimenesta, jotka rakastuvat olessaan kesän yhdessä lammaspaimenessa. Pitää varmaan vihdoin katsoa se leffa.

n  «Altre culture hanno piantato le tende qui e sono scomparse.»n
Undici racconti ambientati in Wyoming, oltre un secolo dopo la conclusione delle guerre indiane. Terra aspra e spesso ostile. Uno dei simboli dello stato è il Bisonte. Terra dai paesaggi mozzafiato, tra ranch e parchi nazionali voluti da Theodore Roosevelt, ricordate? quello del “You've made this Grizzly look like a hairy cow" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyZAub...
Undici racconti, Il manzo scuoiato a mezzo, Un paio di speroni, Giù nel fango, L’erba al confine del mondo, e ancora Gente del Wyoming, da cui è stato tratto Brokeback Mountain. Storie dure, dove va in scena l’America profonda; quella del Mito della Frontiera; quella dove stivali, speroni, cavalli, merda di vacca e Winchester sopra l’uscio di casa, sono ancora oggi ben radicati.
Nelle elezioni presidenziali del 2016, Donald ha avuto il 70,1% delle preferenze ...
Da Wikipedia: «Il Wyoming è uno Stato degli Stati Uniti, quello con minore popolazione. Confina a nord con il Montana, a est con il Dakota del Sud e il Nebraska, a sud con il Colorado e a ovest con lo Utah e l'Idaho. La capitale dello Stato è Cheyenne. Il nome Wyoming deriva dalla parola in lingua munsee “xwé:wamənk” che significa presso il grande fiume calmo usata in origine per denominare la Wyoming Valley in Pennsylvania. Fort Laramie (1834) fu il primo avamposto americano nella regione.».
«La realtà non è mai un granché utile, da queste parti.»
Sarà un caso se Clint ha ambientato il suo Gli spietati proprio in Wyoming? E sarà di certo un caso se anche The Hateful Eight … http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXlI6E...
Splendidi. Semplicemente.
Del resto, lo aveva già detto molto bene lei … http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

Magnificent, beautiful, honest and sad. This may be my favourite short story collection.

A very strong collection of immaculately told stories which all compliment each other, so while there were no real stand-outs, the whole was certainly greater than the sum of its parts. Together the stories paint an honest, sad and aching portrait of Wyoming ranch life. Proulx's wonderful prose immerses you immediately into the lives of the assorted ragbag, deadbeat, honest, struggling characters. So much is told in so few pages that the stories do not actually feel short and at i was wishing each short would be built into a novel so i could spend more time with each set of characters.

After reading just the first two stories i ordered the next book of Proulx's Wyoming stories.

But, perhaps not a stellar endorsement for moving to live in Wyoming.

Close Range is a collection of short stories that all take place in Wyoming by Annie Proulx. I found the quality of the stories a bit uneven, despite truly appreciating two of them and, of course, having seen the eponymous film made out of the last one, "Brokeback Mountain." Each of the stories features the natural beauty of Wyoming (a state in which I have never set foot), but all are also brutal tales of abandon and violence (mostly against women and, in one case, against homosexuals.) The writing itself is good and visual, as one would expect in short stories where the writer has to capture and hold the reader's attention for just a short while.

Most of the stories focus on an object which is the center around which the characters pivot during the story: a half-skinned steer, a pair of spurs, pictures of Wyoming governors. My favorite ones in the collection here: 'The Half-Skinned Steer', 'Pair a Spurs' and, of course, 'Brokeback Mountain' which was truly exceptional. Here are some random quotes I enjoyed.

From "The Half-Skinned Steer":
With the lapping subtlety of incoming tide the shape of the ranch began to gather in his mind; he could recall the intimate fences he'd made, taut wire and perfect corners, the draws and rock outcrops, the watercourse valley steepening, cliffs like bones with shreds of meat on them rising and rising, and the stream plunging suddenly underground, disappearing into subterranean darkness of blind fish..." (p. 31)

It was her voice that drew you in, that low tangy voice, wouldn't matter if she was saying the alphabet, what you heard was the rustle of hay. She could make you smell the smoke from an unlit fire. (p. 33)

From "The Mud Below":
It was a hard, fast ride that ended in the mud. He passed a coal train in the dark, the dense rectangles that were the cars gliding against the indigo night, another, and another, and another. Very slowly, as slowly as light comes on a clouded morning, the euphoric heat flushed through him, or maybe it was just the memory of it. (p. 78)

From "The People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water":
Other cultures have camped here a while and disappeared. Only earth and sky matter. Only the endless repeated floor of morning light. You begin to see that God does not owe us much beyond that. (p. 97)

From "A Lonely Coast":
You ever see a house burning up in the night, way to hell and gone out there on the plains? Nothing but blackness and your headlights cutting a little wedge into it, could be the middle of the ocean for all you can see. And in that big dark a crown of flame the size of your thumbnail trembles. You'll drive for an hour seeing it until it burns out or you do, until you pull of the road to close your eyes or look up at sky punctured with bullet holes. And you might think about the people in the burning house, see them trying for the stairs, but mostly you don't give a damn. They are too far away. Like everything else. (p. 187)

There were times when I thought the Buckly was the best place in the world, but it could shift on you and then the whole dump seemed a mess of twist-face losers, the women with eyebrows like crowbars, the men covered with bristly red hair, knuckles the size of new potatoes, showing the gene pool was small and the rivulets that once fed it had dried up. (p. 198)

The most important story here is that of "Brokeback Mountain" which was a massive hit (3 Oscars) when made into a movie directed by Ang Lee and starring Jake Gyllenhaal and the late Heath Ledger (I had forgotten that he played this role before Joker in The Dark Knight!) I sort of wish I had read the story before seeing the movie, because naturally, rather than conjuring up new images as I read, my mind was busy recalling scenes from the movie as I read the story. As in the film, the story is an unlikely homosexual relationship between two cowboys in the back country of Wyoming, Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar.

n  He has to be packed and away from the place that morning. Again the ranch is on the market and they've shipped out the last of the horses, paid everybody off the day before, the owner saying, "Give em to the real estate shark, I'm out a here," dropping the keys in Ennis' hand. He might have to stay with his married daughter until he picks up a job, yet he is suffused with a sense of pleasure because Jack Twist was in his dream.
The stale coffee is boiling up, but he catches it before it goes over the side, pours it into a stained cup and blows on the black liquid, lets a panel of the dream slide forward. If he does not force his attention on it, it might stoke the day, rewarm that old, cold time on the mountain when the owned the world and nothing seemed wrong. The wind strikes the trailer like a load of dirt coming off a dump truck, eases, dies, leaves a temporary silence.n (p. 253)

Out west among cowpokes and rednecks and Bible-thumping ignoramuses, there is, of course, no acceptance of homosexuality. The love between the two men is both passionate and doomed, both know it but neither will fully admit it. Jack is the more reckless of the two, but Ennis holds back. And is unable to look Jack in the face. What Jack remembers and craved in a way he could neither help nor understand was the time that distant summer on Brokeback when Ennis had come up behind him and pulled him close, that silent embrace satisfying some shared and sexless hunger. (p. 276)

At the end of the tale, we return the Ennis' dreams: Around that time Jack began to appear in his dreams, Jack as he had first seen him, curly-headed and smiling and bucktoothed, talking about getting up off his pockets and into the control zone, but the can of beans with the spoon handle jutting out and balanced on the log was there as well, in a cartoon shape and lurid colors that gave the dreams a flavor of comic obscenity. The spoon handle was the kind that could be used as a tire iron. And he would wake sometimes in grief, sometimes with the old sense of joy and release; the pillow sometimes wet, sometimes the sheets.
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. (p. 283)

Ultimately, societal norms destroy what could have been a beautiful love relationship between Jack and Ennis. The two men pass it off at first as just a function of their lonely job on the mountain and as a result of the taboo. However, the fact that they continue to see each other for years points to the fact that there truly was love between them. Personally, I am mystified at how homosexuality can provoke such violence in its detractors, some of whom being repressed homosexuals themselves. This story was incredibly important, because it exposed in an non-confrontational way the real possibility of love between virile men and the tragedy of a society that refuses to embrace their relationship.

This book was a runner-up for the 2000 Pulitzer, won that year by what I considered to be a rather lackluster Interpreter of Maladies which was also a collection of short stories. Not having read Waiting, I cannot speak for that book, but I think that Close Range was stronger than the winner in any case. Proulx is a gifted writer, but I preferred The Shipping News and her description of Newfoundland to this collection of stories about Wyoming. She does have a way of describing great spaces, somewhat analogous, I think, to Pynchon's penchant for describing chaotic, anarchic places.

Amazing voice. Reminds me of McCarthy. Captures the barren landscape, unforgiving and unyielding until the people just break after a lifetime trying to work it. Amazing the movie follows "Brokeback Mountain" exactly. I'm afraid people get so caught up in the "gay cowboy" movie thing that they miss that Wyoming is a main character, the shriveling poverty and loss are characters, and in this a love story happens. It is tragic because it seems to be true love--gay or straight is secondary. These two find true shelter in each other in a harsh, harsh world. A dying world. The entire collection is compelling, and I'm not afraid to say Brokeback Mountain is one of my all-time favorite movies. With this source material, Ang Lee, the rugged beauty of those mountains contrasted with the poor, dusty towns and youth stolen by survival, and the performances of the actors, it is a perfect film and a travesty not to win the Oscar.

A truly wonderful book, that I don't mind telling you made me cry like a baby.

"Nobody leaves Wyoming unless they have to," Annie Proulx. I'm pleased I waited until I had to leave Wyoming to read this book, despite it stirring powerful feelings of homesickness. I had encountered 1-2 Proulx stories in the New Yorker before now, I had loved the film version of Brokeback Mountain, and of course, I lived in Laramie for a decade where Proulx is something of a quiet celebrity.

The passage quoted below, from 'People in Hell Just Want A Drink of Water' is, for me, at the heart of this collection. Proulx's characterization is second-to-none (better, perhaps, than even Stephen King, whose characters are among the best crafted in all of American lit.), and yet, despite the accuracy, and feeling with which she crafts her characters, their stories are often disjointed and incomplete. This is because, people, culture, civilization, all of this shrinks when you stand on the prairie in the shadow of the mountains and you feel that Wyoming wind, "no local breeze, but the great harsh sweep of wind from the turning of the earth."

"Dangerous and indifferent ground: against its fixed mass the tragedies of people count for nothing although the signs of misadventure are everywhere. No past slaughter nor cruelty, no accident nor murder that occurs on the little ranches or at the isolate crossroads with their bare populations of three or seventeen, or in the reckless trailer courts of mining towns delays the flood of morning light. Fences, cattle, roads, refineries, mines, gravel pits, traffic lights, graffiti'd celebration of athletic victory on bridge overpass, crust of blood of the Wal-Mart loading dock, the sun-faded wreaths of plastic flowers marking death on a highway are ephemeral. Other cultures have camped here a while and disappeared. Only earth and sky matter. Only the endlessly repeated flood of morning light. You begin to see that God does not owe us much beyond that."

P.S.
And, if my recommendation has persuaded you to read Close Range, but you're wondering what to listen to while doing so, well, then let me recommend the perfect playlist. It will enhance, not distract, from Annie Proulx's eternal, melancholic Wyoming.


Close Range: (A Literary Soundtrack)

Nick Cave's 'Music from: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford'


"A Good Man is Hard to Find", "An Old Watermill by a Waterfall", and "A Thousand Goodnights" - Milton Brown (Milton Brown and His Musical Brownies)


"Nebraska" - Bruce Springsteen (Nebraska)


"The Sky Above, the Mud Below" and "Prairie in the Sky" - Tom Russell (Song of the West)


"Good Run & Good Luck" - Clint Black (No Time To Kill)


"Honky Tonk Man" and "Guitars, Cadillacs" - Dwight Yoakum (Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc. Etc.)


Various Artists' 'Brokeback Mountain (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)'


Nick Cave's 'The Proposition'

There are two more volumes of Wyoming Stories. I'm pretty excited about that!

Bison, bulls and blood bay horses. Dry grass, sagebrush and dusty earth. Ranches with mansard roofs, sitting in rugged landscapes. Local kids casually passing by rupestrian art, while others find ancient saddles in abandoned caves. Everything in this book is evocative. It is also wild and remote, foreign in fact, and at times a little magical because of it. I swear I could hear the tinkling artisan spurs with tiny comets on them, in one of the stories. I wanted to taste those Moon and Stars heirloom watermelons badly. Another world beckons in these few hundred pages. It pulled me right in.

If the surroundings are enchanted at first glance, the place remains rough. Annie Proulx’s exceptional eye for the human condition made a strong impression on me and it turns out she wasn’t out to idealize the countryside, even as she successfully celebrated its beauty. The bandits, dimwits and flawed heroes populating this collection of short stories are what kept my interest afloat throughout the book. Their shortcomings are spectacular, but often enough so are their ambitions. And there’s widespread violence in these pages. Nothing too showy, usually more of the low-level, everyday kind. In casual exchanges, it may well remain barely discernible, but it’s still there. So while making great use of fascinating backdrops, the stories are really about power plays, meddling neighbors, middle-of-the-road varieties of family oppression. People are often lonesome. Many are disillusioned. A few of them are plainly disturbed. For most characters, their lives remain terribly domestic.

In "The Mud Below", a support character and fellow traveler—some religious type—can’t bear to see our hero of the moment, a pint-sized bull rider, leave his family behind in his search for purpose and fame. He speaks up. Colloquial language runs through the entire collection of stories like a river, but in this case our man has a remarkable talent for imagery:

“Aw, what I mean is,” said Bitts, “you don't get how it is for nobody but your own dee self. You don't get it that you can't have a fence with only one post.”

There is also beauty in the domestic, which makes for so much in these stories. "People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water" captures it well, for instance:

“She was up in the night and to the kitchen to scrub the ceiling, the table legs, the soles of her husband’s boots, rubbing the old meat grinder with a banana skin to bring up the silvery bloom. A murderer she might be but no one could say her house wasn’t clean.”

"Pair a Spurs" made me realize that some people used to make a living—perhaps still do—as spur-makers. As a French speaker and a total stranger to ranch living, I don’t mind admitting I had to look up a handful of terms in what follows, yet the sum of the parts instantly lit up my imagination:

“That late, hard spring he finished a pair of spurs with half-drop shanks in steel blued to the iridescent flush of ripe plums. The line was severe and elegant. The silver buttons, the silver-overlaid blunt-star rowels and shank tips held the same pale gleam as twilight water. Silver comets whose tails flowed into the shanks ornamented the heel bands. He added a playful note in a pair of jinglebob stars pendant from the rowel pins, the source of a shivering metal music pleasing to horse and rider.”

As you get to "Brokeback Mountain", the final story, the only one you knew beforehand because of the movie, you expect your heart to be broken all over again. And sure enough, it is:

“The shirt seemed heavy until he saw there was another shirt inside it, the sleeves carefully worked down inside Jack’s sleeves. It was his own plaid shirt, lost, he’d thought, long ago in some damn laundry, his dirty shirt, the pocket ripped, buttons missing, stolen by Jack and hidden here inside Jack’s own shirt, the pair like two skins, one inside the other, two in one. He pressed his face into the fabric and breathed in slowly through his mouth and nose, hoping for the faintest smoke and mountain sage and salty sweet stink of Jack but there was no real scent, only the memory of it, the imagined power of Brokeback Mountain of which nothing was left but what he held in his hands.”

"Brokeback Mountain" ended up being my favorite story and I really need to see the movie again. But everything in Close Range that preceded it made for a wonderful buildup. By the time you get to the horny cowboys, you are so ready, you're champing at the bit. But then, so are they.

H Άννι Πρου μας προσφέρει έντεκα διηγήματα που όλα έχουν ένα κοινό: διαδραματίζονται στην άγρια επαρχία του Γουαιόμινγκ των Ηνωμένων Πολιτειών. Το βιβλίο παίρνει το όνομά του από το πρώτο διήγημα, που απολαύσαμε και ως ταινία πριν λίγα χρόνια με τον Χιθ Λέτζερ και τον Τζέηκ Γλίλενχαλ, στους ρόλους δυο σκληροτράχηλων καουμπόι που συνάπτουν ερωτική σχέση. Όλα τα διηγήματα μιλούν για μοναχικούς ανθρώπους: ένας ηλικιωμένος που αναζητά την χαμένη του νιότη, άντρες που μένουν μόνοι τους, γυναίκες που ζητάνε την ευτυχία τα Σαββατόβραδα στα επαρχιακά μπαρ, άνθρωποι που τα βάζουν με τα άγρια καιρικά φαινόμενα αλλά και με τα ψυχολογικά τους προβλήματα, ιστορίες από το παρελθόν, καλά κρυμμένα οικογενειακά μυστικά. Σε όλα τα διηγήματα κυριαρχεί η απομόνωση, η ερήμωση, η ρημαγμένη ζωή των ηρώων. Η μετάφραση είναι του Κορτό και ομολογουμένως έχει κάνει καλή δουλειά.

confident, steely prose that doesn't let up. A triumph of style and subtlety. The way Proulx writes about wind and the land, and how those forces shaped these lonely, deep-running people, is immaculate.