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?

Packs a punch for a short story. Heartbreaking, but wonderfully written.

|| 3.5 stars ||

This is such a tragic story, but so beautifully written.
It’s a story that many queer people used to live through in the past, which makes it all the more heartbreaking to read…
There’s not much focus here on the build-up of their love connection, but instead it tells the story of how sad and lonely and angry and impossible their lives were because of that love.

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.

That one always gets me, I just can't read it without crying at the end. Sooo good. And what a gorgeous adaptation - so beautifully done.

n  “Jack, I swear —” he said, though Jack had never asked him to swear anything and was himself not the swearing kind.n

Not a single word is wasted in this very short Annie Proulx story. It has the weight of a novel, with every word so carefully chosen, with every deceptively simple sentence packing an unexpected punch.

It’s a story of love punctuated by the weight of fear, longing that never gets rewarded, crushing loneliness that is meant to stay, and the price of denial of your needs. It’s the story of regret, the one that comes when it’s too late.

I can say it’s heartbreaking, but it’s actually way more subtle than that. It doesn’t as much break your heart - from the beginning you know there is no happy ending here - but instead makes it ache in a raw, haunting way.

n  “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.”n  
n  
n  n

Two young men in working-class rural 1960s America where living life together in the open could have had dire consequences. And one of them was unwilling to take that risk. And so they carried out their affair in stolen minutes and days here and there over two decades — “One thing never changed: the brilliant charge of their infrequent couplings was darkened by the sense of time flying, never enough time, never enough.”

And it’s a protracted gut punch.

n  “Try this one,” said Jack, “and I’ll say it just one time. Tell you what, we could a had a good life together, a fuckin real good life. You wouldn’t do it, Ennis, so what we got now is Brokeback Mountain. Everything built on that. It’s all we got, boy, fuckin all, so I hope you know that if you don’t never know the rest. Count the damn few times we been together in twenty years. Measure the fuckin short leash you keep me on, then ask me about Mexico and then tell me you’ll kill me for needin it and not hardly never gettin it. You got 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 me, Ennis, you son of a whoreson bitch. I wish I knew how to quit you.”n

So sad, but such a well-written utterly devastating story. Those two shirts on a wire hanger — that’s the image that will always stay in my mind. The price of prejudice, denial and regret. And love.

n  n

5 stars.
________
A link to the pdf version of this story: https://www.taosmemory.com/oscar/Brok...

——————

Also posted on my blog.

I don't know how I never knew this was just a very short story. I wish I'd read this years ago. The movie was good, but this was even better. It always amazes me how even a very short story can pull so strongly at your emotions. Thanks so much for the suggestion, Jessica :)

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.

This is another of those love stories that are both beautiful and tragic. This particular copy was one the first four Novellix short stories published this year (in Swedish). I’d like maybe someday to read the English original.

My kind of romance.
30% love, 80% depression and 0% maths.

n  

One thing never changed: the brilliant charge of their infrequent couplings was darkened by the sense of time flying, never enough time, never enough.

n

I enjoyed reading the short story two weeks ago and finally had the opportunity to see the movie. I was concerned about the film staying true to the short story in terms of characterization and atmosphere. The reading was enjoyable; I didn’t want to sour the memory of it by an unfulfilling movie. I was pleasantly surprised. Director Ang Lee and screen writers Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana did a brilliant job of interpreting and synchronizing the original text into a script. I honestly feel that I got a better understanding of the story by watching the film because so much is expressed visually—panoramic, mountainous and remote natural setting, and in human eye contact and body language; this is especially true with the intense, wistful facial expressions of actor Heath Ledger playing Ennis. He really gave a terrific performance.

In text and film, the isolated mountainous backdrop beautifully corresponds with the men’s tortured relationship. A natural sense of freedom emanates in the presence of the mountain setting and in the presence of one another, yet both are limited as each may not exist in the wider world, the wider community. Mountains aren’t ubiquitous, neither sadly, is societal tolerance for gay people.

I have to admit that when I first read this story, I had difficulty understanding a few scenes or passages, since it was written in the vernacular of the back country. But regret and fear of discovery are languages we can all understand.

We live in a global community where tolerance and acceptance are not always uniform. Many people who make lifestyle choices that may not be acceptable to their respective communities still suffer both physical and mental retaliation and ostracism. Although we have come a fair distance in North America, and in many other parts of the world, we still have a long way to go.

This story, and The Hours by Michael Cunningham, helped me understand that we have to stop succumbing to society's views of "normal, acceptable and popular." Years ago, I made it a point never to follow fads - it is just too easy to "follow the herd" and adopt the current thinking or mode. The first time I heard the phrase "march to the beat of your own drum," I liked it. It hasn't been easy, and very often I still err on the side of caution, but for the most part, I try.

Such a heartbreaking story, but worth the read. (The movie was a fairly decent adaptation, but a few key elements were changed. Broke my heart, too.)