BIRD CLOUD – A MEMOIR OF PLACE by Annie Proulx (Scribner, 2011)
Place is a major part of Annie Proulx’s writing and life. Everything begins with the landscape.
However, as a feature in The Guardian notes, she is scornful of the adage that you should write what you know. She has said: “All it produces is tiresome middle-class novels of people who I think are writing about things they know, but you wish to God they didn’t”.
Proulx is a late learner and was a thrice divorced 53 year-old woman when she wrote her first collection of short stories (Heart Songs). Five years later came her Pulitzer-prize winning novel The Shipping News. The film version of her short story Brokeback Mountain introduced her to an even wider audience.
My collection of Annie Proulx’s books.
I am a big fan of her fiction and have made a point of buying any book of hers I see but this one turned out to be a big disappointment.
It is the account of an ambitious but ultimately misguided building project. The profits from her belated literary success was ploughed into what he hoped would be her dream home built on wild prairie land near a dramatic cliff in 640 acres of Wyoming, the least populous of the United States. Continue reading
