Brokeback Mountain

This book was chosen for me in the 'pick it for me challenge' in the m/m romance group here on goodreads. It's a classic (or should be), I saw the movie years ago, and I was amazed how short the book is.

This is one of the most well written stories I have ever read. In places, it is more like a sketch than a painting. And yet it describes the main characters and their awful dilemma and, ultimately, suffering in such clear pictures that it broke my heart all over again.

This is one of the few "tragedies" that gets 5 stars from me. It is an amazing book which should be required reading for everyone.

I finished what to me is the best piece of writing I've encountered in some time: Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx. A couple of years ago, I vowed to read no more works by Proulx. She is doggedly, unremittingly depressing. But due to a challenge, I decided to try this short story, knowing I wouldn't have to put up with her for long. We all know the story - two rugged cowboys faced with isolation turn to each other for companionship and sex - 64 pages, I thought I could zip through it. What I discovered was faultless integration of psychology with the environment. The story is told by Ennis, one of the cowboys, who expresses his gloom, resignation, and eventual capitulation to sensations and emotions he hadn't known existed. Proulx show more gets into the mind of this taciturn cowboy, so the reader does not doubt that he is the one telling the story. Yes, of course, it's ultimately depressing, but the writing is perfection. I found an opera based on the story with a libretto by Proulx. The setting is fitting, the cowboys look like cowboys, the dialogue is right, but the whole thing is just sung conversation. I love opera for the music, particularly the arias. The setting helps, as do the costumes, but hours' worth of droning conversation are not my idea of emotional expression. Too bad. show less

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 show more 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. show less

I listened to the audio version of this short novel, which took me through a walk with my dog and the preparation of a simple dinner—just one hour, but that hour was filled to the brim with emotion and gorgeous prose and imagery so vivid that I'm sure I would have imagined a movie in my head even had I not seen the film adaptation already. This story of two young men who let time and circumstance steal by and who never get a chance to fully express their love for one another is incredibly poignant, and speaks to all of us who've experienced loss and missed connections. Great narration by Campbell Scott.

Vocês lembram daquela bosta de Oscar de 2006 em que o horrendo Crash ganhou de melhor filme e não Brokeback Mountain? Até hoje não superei aquilo e foi uma das razões de ter parado de acompanhar essa cerimônia idiota.
Pois então, depois de todos esses anos achando o filme maravilhoso só agora li o conto que lhe inspirou e é tão maravilhoso quanto o filme, guardadas as devidas proporções.

Véritablement du génie.
Update 20.02.2026:

Je souhaitais revenir dessus car récemment je n'avais pas réussi à m'endormir et j'avais écrit un pavé dessus en anglais sur tumblr....
Il est de certaines œuvres à mon avis où il est absurde de les soumettre à un système de notation...car il me semble que ce n'est pas elles que l'on note mais nous même plus directement, devant notre capacité à faire chenal d'un ensemble d'émotions des plus fondamentale... de les greffer dans son appareillage émotionnel ou se rendre compte dans l'effroi qu'on ne dispose pas de la structure adéquate pour les accueillir...
J'ai cette image d'une rivière dont on ne traverse jamais les eaux plus d'une fois, le.la même et il me semble bien que l'on show more ressort d'une lecture comme celle-ci différent.e c'est sûre... soit conforté dans ce conditionnement qui nous permet d'être réceptacle et d'ancrer ce qu'il y a de plus fondamentales dans la psychologie des émotions...ou bien à défaut désaxé.e et honteux de ne pas comprendre pq on est pas ébranlé par ce qu'on lit. Dans tous les cas je ne crois pas qu'on puisse en ressortir le.la même je le répète show less

I wonder if my rating is a "today I was cranky" thing. I first read this--it had to have been when the movie came out, because I remember being so surprised at how -clear- the images on the cover were, and how I thought that they'd changed the cover to match the movie. I was a teenager when I read this, in any case. I whipped through it in an amount of time that stunned me and was disappointed and weirded out, like somehow it meant I hated the book. I remember wondering where the -rest- of the book was. Surely a bunch of stuff had been cut out! I did not have a lot of experiences with short stories outside of anthology collections at the time. I understood most of several key passages, but not all, and distinctly remember trying to ask show more my mom what some of them meant without reading out the whole passage. They were all sexual, I got that, and it was precisely why I didn't want to read out the whole of them. I saw ads for the movie and thought, "This is gonna have some serious padding and filler in it. The book is super short!" And the movie did. I still cried at it. My homophobic late grandmother quietly said it was boring, and a lot of unflattering stuff about gay people. Compared to stuff she usually loudly said, that was kind. My aunt agreed with her, but has historically been quieter about her homophobia. Place a real gay person in front of her, though, and she mouths off. I don't remember what my mom said about the movie. I remember she seemed kind of sad.

I thought of the movie a few times while reading this, and given that it's so short, all that means is that the film had a profound effect on me as far as the story goes. Story's still short. I was not as affected by it as an adult. This was largely because I remembered so much of it, and because--I don't know. There's a lot of descriptions of things and narrative passages that sort of ran together, for me. I had to reread a few passages. And I just--okay. The passages that half my life ago, I had to ask my mom what they meant: as an adult, I -still- don't get what Proulx was trying to say or do. I got it was sexual, but--there are a -lot- of words she uses sometimes, when one sentence would do just fine. But the book would have been even shorter, and maybe she couldn't have published it on its own, or something. It's rare that I am more moved by a movie than a book, but this is one of those times. I'm not saying, "Don't read this book," at all. It's more of "The story has a different effect visually." One key difference between the movie and the book that still infuriates me is the movie cut out how much of a monster Jack's dad was. I'd actually recommend both reading the book and seeing the movie if there's emotional space for both. show less