Word: humanizes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Open Your Eyes is an entertaining analysis of the blurry line between reality and fantasy, dreams and nightmare, and the powers of the human mind. Cesar has several experience of deja vu, some that are actually happening for the first time after happening in a dream, and some that he recalls from real life while in the dream...
...only possible but inevitable. She locates her stories, like her novels, in places where the difficulty of survival makes people poor and hard: Close Range: Wyoming Stories, Proulx's first collection of short stories in more than ten years, echoes 1988's collection Heartsongs in its unwavering gaze at human tragedy in nature's liminal spaces, where no quarter is asked and none given by protagonist, nature or narrator. It is this equanimity of Proulx which, together with her remarkable and idiosyncratic eye for texture, makes her stories so compelling. Throwing harsh light, she does not appear to cede sympathy...
Proulx once lived in Vermont and Newfoundland, and the works which made her famous--Heartsongs, Postcards and The Shipping News--are more than simply rooted in those places: it is Proulx's firm belief, a belief that sometimes seems to verge on determinism, that geography inexorably shapes human behavior. She now lives in Wyoming, and Close Range is a collection which grows out of what Proulx understands as the essential spirit of Wyoming: almost no story in this collection goes by without murder or sudden violence, without rape or incest or (nearly always) adultery, Without man or woman being broken...
...identified as "nature writers." Unmistakably, these stories are about people: indeed, it is that for stories which rely so heavily on the impact of environment on behavior, the Close Range stories spend such a small amount of time in actual description of the physical environment. Proulx' concern is the human consequences of the environment, which creeps into the stories and suffuses them with significance but never suffocates them. And in stories that address a limited geographical area and a limited range of settings, and which draw from the same source of tragedy, it is one of the strongest tributes...
...only possible but inevitable. She locates her stories, like her novels, in places where the difficulty of survival makes people poor and hard: Close Range: Wyoming Stories, Proulx's first collection of short stories in more than ten years, echoes 1988's collection Heartsongs in its unwavering gaze at human tragedy in nature's liminal spaces, where no quarter is asked and none given by protagonist, nature or narrator. It is this equanimity of Proulx which, together with her remarkable and idiosyncratic eye for texture, makes her stories so compelling. Throwing harsh light, she does not appear to cede sympathy...