I don't go to or watch movies so I had not preconceived notion about this story. And this story was wonderfully written with beautiful prose and a great pace. It sure packs in a punch for such a short story. ( )

Proulx sure can write. Read this years ago, just listened to the audio and it was very well done. ( )

GROSS AND PERVERTED. Hate the lifestyle of homosexuals and their sexual practices--not that I hate the person just their practices which is what this books is about. It does not make for enjoyable reading. Totally disgusting. ( )

I feel a bit like a philistine when it comes to “Brokeback Mountain”: The relationship between the two farm hands, Ennis and Jack, made sense to me and felt real. Sadly, both the story this short story tells as well as the style in which it is told, fall somewhat flat for me.

Proulx laconically and unemotionally narrates her story and while there are some powerful scenes (the shirts…), I cannot help but feel that some of this story’s potential hasn’t been fulfilled.

I’m late to to read this, though: First published in 1997 and the narrated time starting quite a bit earlier, western societies at least are changing: We’re still farther from true equality than I had would have hoped for but at least in my native Germany, we’re making progress:

With Nyke Slawik und Tessa Ganserer we have two openly transgender people elected to the German parliament, the Bundestag.

And there are more members of the German parliament who give me hope that the times of “tire irons” are over. If you’re interested, read about Armand Zorn, Lamya Kaddor, Kassem Taher Saleh, Muhanad Al-Halak, Serap Güler, Ates Gürpinar (and my apologies in advance to those people whose names I’ve missed).

Three out of five stars for this novella.

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Ceterum censeo Putin esse delendam ( )

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 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. ( )