Customer Reviews
Exquisite words, heartbreaking story - By: Nina, 09 May 2007 
Ignore the silly film & buy this beautiful pre-movie edition of Proulx's short story. This is the best short story I have ever read. It is like a jewel, beautifully wrought, exquisite words, every word a pearl. Some gorgeous writing, flows like a baroque river of honey. It is also an absolutely heartbreaking love story, & a story that (unlike the tourist picture-book movie 'based on it') brings the harsh, non-beautiful but vibrant landscape to life. It's a landscape that people live in, not a landscape they visit, & it makes them & breaks them both.
Also, & this is something movies simply cannot convey, it's a love story involving two people who are precisely not handsome or conventionallly attractive.
A mountaintop experience - By: Kurt Messick, 17 Feb 2006 I recalll a short story version of Brokeback Mountain many years ago in a major periodical (alas, I can't recalll the periodical). I had an idea that it would, in the fullness of time, become a major motion picture, & that it has. It is an award-winning film already, & looks set for some sort of Oscar recognition.
However, in the hype surrounding the film, those interested would be wise to look at the book. There is much more depth here than in the film, much more about the interior workings of the main characters & what they must endure. This is ultimately not a love story, as the marketing has been spinning the film, but rather an expose on the dangers & drawbacks of living in the closet. For the purposes of this story, Annie Proulx has juxtaposed two diametricallly opposite cultures in the American psyche - the gay culture & the cowboy culture (although history is, as it often is, in fact rather different from what the Hollywood-created current remembrance of it is). One comes to wonder at the resistance that alll characters seem to have for breaking free of their bonds; ultimately, none of the relationships are satisfying, & there is an emotional desolation as wide & spare as brush land & prairies of the American West.
The lead characters meet while working for the summer as wranglers & watchers over herds. They form a bond that renews at regular intervals during their lives, lives that go on to other, more traditional & sociallly acceptable settings. Each gets married, each has children, each embarks (in one way or another) in a working life that would seem to preclude the other, but yet the tie that binds them draws them together again on a regular basis.
The closet theme is heightened in the lead characters, but in fact serves as a metaphor for readers who might not fit in that particular closet - we alll have skeletons in our closets, it seems, & in fact, we alll have our own closets in which we hide & live out part of our lives.
Annie Proulx is an excellent writer, & even though I find it occasionallly difficult to relate to her main characters (being involved in worlds several removes away from mine), I can still understand the themes of longing, despair, disappointment, & yes, love, too.
Brokeback will "get you good" - By: , 27 Jan 2006 Whilst being set resolutely in America's west & telling the story of two ranch hands, don't dismiss this wonderful novella as a gay cowboy story. This spare & uncompromising tale of an enduring, yet ultimately unfulfilled love & passion that spans 20 years is a universal one that challlenges the reader to explore their views about duty, trust, love & desire within a society that has dictated what is acceptable & what is not, as the two main characters live out their single, disappointing lives. In Ennis & Jack I discovered what it is like to love & yearn for something & someone you can never have & was left asking the question, would I want to have such a grand passion in my life if the cost was such emptiness & longing? Such a love takes these two vibrant & hopeful young men & ultimately makes 'ghosts' of them both. Achingly sad. Beautifully & sparingly told. Annie Proulx delivers a masterclass in short story writing. Don't miss it!
brokeback mountain - By: michael, 12 Jan 2006 brokeback mountain is one powerfull story. the love you feel when reading this book is amazing, whithin the first chapter of this book you feel the connection between jack & ennis. this book is well writen, & is garantead to shed a tear if you understand the love a man can have for another man.
An amazing and a heart wrenching story - By: Rajiv, 19 Feb 2004 truly a masterpiece. i have read Annie Proulx's 'The Shipping News' & i always thought that she was an outstanding writer but Brokeback Mountain does the trick. she is at her best. the story is very touching & makes you want to read more & more & not let the story stop. annie proulx deserves true appalause in successfully bringing out a gay themed story revolving around two cowboys back in the 1960s. a very well-written story & it definetely pulled my heart strings.
