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The Half-Skinned Steer. It's a hallucinatory story of an old man driving to visit his family for the first time in years while being haunted by his memories which include a steer that was stunned, half skinned and had its tongue cut out before it woke up and staggered off.
The Mud Below is about bullriding and self hatred and social conditioning.
Job History is a short gruelling ride through a gruelling life.
The Blood Bay is macabre and dark and yet the only one that I could have laughed in.
People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water is just fkn tragic; it's about family, crude social justice and pain.
The Bunchgrass Edge of the World is winning for clear favourite. It has the dust, grit and hopelessness, but it also has a whimsical side and sense of endurance that appeals to me. I love Wauneta's wheat patch, Ottaline's decidedly odd relationship with the tractor and old Red's inability to quit.
Pair a Spurs is about being old, isolated and going crazy. It's also about being tough as hell.
A Lonely Coast was saddening but not nearly as dark as some of the others. Some very tough women getting older, leaving behind crap relationships, finding new crap relationships and finally ending with a passionate, destructive finale. A bit more about embracing life than just enduring it. “Friend, it's easier than you think to yield up to the dark impulse.”
The Governors of Wyoming. I suspect this of being a lot more meaningful to natives of Wyoming, there are a lot of snatches of people leading lives that would be instantly and painfully recognisable. To me it was about small lives, lives that don't go anywhere.
55 Miles to the Gas Pump. I'm kinda stuck here, I would recommend reading it (all two pages). Not because the subject matter is fun, happy or in any way attractive, but because it's perfect.
Brokeback Mountain. Liked it, especially compared to other shorts stories in this collection. I felt the treatment of the men's feelings was somehow gentle. I found the movie more emotional and dramatic, but the story left me with a sense of deeper connection. “Later, that dozy embrace solidified in his memory as the single moment of artless, charmed happiness in their separate and difficult lives.”
In summary I'm glad I read them. I would compare the experience to reading Steinbeck - the writing is so immediate and the sense of what you read is so intimate and intense that you read it despite the pain and suffering. As I read more I was getting less overwhelmed by the sheer nastiness and picking up a lot more on the courage and the love. There was a lot of love.
The Mud Below is about bullriding and self hatred and social conditioning.
Job History is a short gruelling ride through a gruelling life.
The Blood Bay is macabre and dark and yet the only one that I could have laughed in.
People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water is just fkn tragic; it's about family, crude social justice and pain.
The Bunchgrass Edge of the World is winning for clear favourite. It has the dust, grit and hopelessness, but it also has a whimsical side and sense of endurance that appeals to me. I love Wauneta's wheat patch, Ottaline's decidedly odd relationship with the tractor and old Red's inability to quit.
Pair a Spurs is about being old, isolated and going crazy. It's also about being tough as hell.
A Lonely Coast was saddening but not nearly as dark as some of the others. Some very tough women getting older, leaving behind crap relationships, finding new crap relationships and finally ending with a passionate, destructive finale. A bit more about embracing life than just enduring it. “Friend, it's easier than you think to yield up to the dark impulse.”
The Governors of Wyoming. I suspect this of being a lot more meaningful to natives of Wyoming, there are a lot of snatches of people leading lives that would be instantly and painfully recognisable. To me it was about small lives, lives that don't go anywhere.
55 Miles to the Gas Pump. I'm kinda stuck here, I would recommend reading it (all two pages). Not because the subject matter is fun, happy or in any way attractive, but because it's perfect.
Brokeback Mountain. Liked it, especially compared to other shorts stories in this collection. I felt the treatment of the men's feelings was somehow gentle. I found the movie more emotional and dramatic, but the story left me with a sense of deeper connection. “Later, that dozy embrace solidified in his memory as the single moment of artless, charmed happiness in their separate and difficult lives.”
In summary I'm glad I read them. I would compare the experience to reading Steinbeck - the writing is so immediate and the sense of what you read is so intimate and intense that you read it despite the pain and suffering. As I read more I was getting less overwhelmed by the sheer nastiness and picking up a lot more on the courage and the love. There was a lot of love.
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I read Brokeback by itself a couple of years ago and just was not as affected by it, I just kept wondering...and?? But, I don't know, this time around I cried a lot, it was just so much more beautiful, the relationship more intense and touching somehow, I'm going to chalk it to being more familiar with the genre, growing older and becoming more of a sentimental wet tissue, and having it in the context of the other stories.
I know that Brokeback started out by itself and other people loved it then, but, I didn't feel it so much because I didn't read Westerns etc... before I read Brokeback the first time. This time around I could see better, the kind of people Jack and Ennis were. I still get misty thinking about Ennis meeting Jack's father and stealing the shirts, and thinking of Ennis as an old man from the beginning of the story.
I love that your favourite story is Bunchgrass, it was definitely more whimsical like you said. I thought it had a really satisfying, and kind of uplifting death, whereas in the other stories the deaths were really miserable. I loved the tractor too, and then I also loved the way Flyby courted Ottaline; without any fuss.
I literally woke people on the plane while I was reading Blood Bay because I couldn't contain my loud "Hah!" and I read 55 Miles twice and snickered in delight both times. I think it's brilliant when she's funny, it's the tone, it's cackle!Funny if that makes sense.
I really loved Governors of Wyoming at the beginning, Shy's flashbacks started off beautiful and sweet, so naturally I was totally dismayed and kind of crushed by the end of it.
But it was definitely People in Hell that made me cry the most.
I know what you mean about feeling more of the love as you went, and I just think the way Proulx loves is beautiful because no one is simply heroic or demonic. She wrote working within archetypes but didn't subject them to stereotyping; she wrote these characters wholly.
I...it was a huge mistake bringing it with me on holiday, Close Range demanded a dark room and a morbid/misery-wallowing state of mind which is great in the privacy of my own bedroom at home but it's really not conducive of holiday cheer.
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I had to work up to reading each story - sometimes when I'm reading I just keep moving from one story to the next and you know you've hit something really good when you can't do that, when you have to stop, pause and reflect.
55 Miles.. it's funny and awful and I made
Not conducive to holiday cheer at all!
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Yeah, there's so much impact to each story, and you need some time to absorb it all before you move on.
And on the flip side, I also liked the way each story was positioned within the anthology, they made sense in terms of how ready you feel for the next story after you've read the previous one: it was very very good that Brokeback Mountain was the last story and not say...Gov of Wyoming, it's still depressing as hell, but somehow a gentler place to end.
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Clever!