1.5 ⭐

Voy a ser honesto, no termine todos los relatos, me habrán quedado cuatro de once pero no podía seguir así que finalizó acá.
Cada relato era más aburrido que el anterior, ninguno me atrapaba y me daba ganas de seguir leyendo.

Compre el libro claramente por Brokeback Mountain, sin saber que solo era un relato y que los otros que le seguían eran parte de otro libro.

Brokeback Mountain tampoco me enamoro de hecho fue un 2.5 ⭐ y todos los demás relatos van son 1 o 2 ⭐.
Son muy aburridos y me pareció que las historias que contaban no eran para nada interesante y no generaban nada.

Así que definitivamente este no era un libro para mí.

3.5

yes i read this entire collection for brokeback mountain and no i do not think i will ever go to wyoming after this

Il grido disperato della frontiera. Bellissimi.

Exceptional writing. I must try the Shipping News next.

I really enjoyed Annie Proulx’s writing style and voice, even the shortest of stories with 55 Miles to the Gas Pump fully immersed you into the story. However, there were several times that I put it down and debated whether or not to pick it up. There’s a recurring theme of sexual assault through the various stories that I found unnecessary to the stories themselves and made it difficult to push through.

Maybe that’s on me for not researching the book before hand though, evident in how I had no idea that Proulx wrote THE Brokeback Mountain which is the final story in this collection, and a great one at that. Having seen the film a handful of times it doesn’t even compare to the story (which is why I’m giving it 3 stars instead of 2).

do i like the Brokeback movie? no not really, i was bored out of my mind. did i love the Brokeback story tho? fuck yeah and imma say it, it's the only good one. don't really remember the other stories.

The conventional wisdom in short stories, I feel, is that they encompass short periods of time and examine the profound significance of small events. The stories in Close Range, however, seem to take the opposite approach - lifetimes are squeezed into ten or twenty pages, the distilled essence of memories are arranged like objects on a table that, taken together, capture the undercurrent of entire lives. In this way they read like novels that have been boiled down, their steam piped through an alembic and held in rough, miniature bottles which, as you would expect, are as potent as anything.

Proulx's prose reminds me, strangely enough, of both Alice Munro and Lucius Shepard, but with a stronger poetry and a sense of control that every now and then she relaxes a little, allowing her language to go deliciously over the top. The subtitle to this collection - Wyoming Stories - clues us in to the real protagonist of these stories: the Wyoming landscape. Proulx evokes the forests and mountains and plains and ranchlands and small towns so vividly I could smell the mud and the livestock and the diesel exhaust from the tractor trailers flying past on the interstate.

But more than just a poetically rendered the landscape, Proulx's Wyoming shapes the lives of her characters almost like a distant god: in the Half Skinned Steer, the unforgiving snow and the rocky outcroppings of an old ranch road literally brings the main character face to face with a demon from his past; in Brokeback Mountain, well, it's the mountain itself that casts a shadow over those two unhappy (or only briefly happy) lives. The attachment to the ranching life is a running theme here - people who won't give up the land despite its dire economics, who give themselves over to dude ranching or working for rich out of towners come to live a fantasy cowboy lifestyle, or, in one story, who go so far as to kill off livestock in a radical attempt to save the natural environment. These are people who are drunk on the land, made delusional by it and destroyed by it. And, by the end, it's hard not to envy them.

Eccentrica, durissima, commovente, ironica, drammatica, straziante. Davvero eccellente questa raccolta di racconti, di cui fa parte il celeberrimo Brokeback Mountain (ma non è l’unica perla qui presente).
Le storie ti riducono a uno straccio, ma la prosa, nella sua complessità, è vivida, minuziosa, ogni racconto ha una diversa sfumatura di intensità e le descrizioni del Wyoming sono visivamente efficaci, posso vedere le tempeste, il vento, la polvere… La natura, i paesaggi sono impressionanti, tanto da assurgere al ruolo di protagonisti e dare la sensazione di poter influenzare i personaggi e la storia che sta per accadere.
Ci vuole un’anima sensibile e coraggiosa per vedere tanta bellezza nella durezza della vita, tanta profondità nella banalità della vita.
Brava, Annie!

it is so bad i want to give you a zero, but that’s not possible, so i give you a one (purely for brokeback mountain)

Proulx’s evocation of place is so vivid you can almost smell the Wyoming air. Fabulous writing.

Tell you what, them queer cowboys like to broke my heart. Annie Proulx, I wish I knew how to quit you.

Your strange mix of roughed up realism and supernatural does something to my insides. It’s too much for ordinary sentence structure. Pours out all over the confines of punctuation, seeping into my subconscious until I’m drunk and reeling reading just a sentence then a few paragraphs and soon the whole story to anyone who’ll listen. And still I want more.

This is such a beautifully written book. The prose is so well crafted and polished until it shines. Annie Proulx’s subtle mixture of the character’s voice and local dialect and slang with her own elegiac descriptions is a great example of free indirect style. She is amazing at describing landscapes and summing up people in a few sentences and she’s good at the subtlety of smell (all these cattle ranchers pong). My favourite stories were Brokeback Mountain – but you kind of imagine the story with the actors, having seen the movie a few times – and also The Mud Below – which was about a rodeo rider, and I imagine they also used bits of in the film. The rest of the stories are consistently good too.