Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx
May. 1st, 2006 09:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quippeThe Blurb On The Back:
Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar live hard and lonely lives as ranch hands in the wild, unforgiving landscape of Wyoming. They are "country boys with no prospects, brought up to hard work and privation, both rough-mannered and tough-spoken", glad to have found one another's company where none had been expected.
But suddenly companionship becomes something else on Brokeback Mountain: something not looked for, something deadly ...
It's a bit of a cheat on my part to include this as a novel when in fact it's a short story that I got for free from Time Out. My reason for reading it was because I'd originally planned to see the film, but then I never got around to it and on the strength of the original story, I probably never will.
It's not that it's badly written. Annie Proulx gives a good sense of place and she sets up her two male protagonists. The problem is that I don't care about them. Either of them. There's no humanity there. There is the dilemma about how they each handle their homosexuality but the men fail to connect with anyone and it's difficult to see how come they're so attracted to each other. It seems to be more a relationship borne from circumstance than attraction and I did not sympathise with either of them. Because of this, the story left me cold and disinterested.
The Verdict:
It's well written but emotionally frigid. I felt nothing for the characters and nothing for their plight. There's an interesting story in there, but I don't feel as though it's been told to me.
Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar live hard and lonely lives as ranch hands in the wild, unforgiving landscape of Wyoming. They are "country boys with no prospects, brought up to hard work and privation, both rough-mannered and tough-spoken", glad to have found one another's company where none had been expected.
But suddenly companionship becomes something else on Brokeback Mountain: something not looked for, something deadly ...
It's a bit of a cheat on my part to include this as a novel when in fact it's a short story that I got for free from Time Out. My reason for reading it was because I'd originally planned to see the film, but then I never got around to it and on the strength of the original story, I probably never will.
It's not that it's badly written. Annie Proulx gives a good sense of place and she sets up her two male protagonists. The problem is that I don't care about them. Either of them. There's no humanity there. There is the dilemma about how they each handle their homosexuality but the men fail to connect with anyone and it's difficult to see how come they're so attracted to each other. It seems to be more a relationship borne from circumstance than attraction and I did not sympathise with either of them. Because of this, the story left me cold and disinterested.
The Verdict:
It's well written but emotionally frigid. I felt nothing for the characters and nothing for their plight. There's an interesting story in there, but I don't feel as though it's been told to me.
