Annie Proulx

(Click here for the Romanian version)
Ennis del Mar wakes before five, wind broking the trailer, hissing in around the aluminium door and window frames. The shirts hanging on a nail shudder slightly in the draft.
Annie Proulx started to publish in her fifties, to become immediately a distinct and powerful voice in contemporary American literature. Her world is rural North America. Her language is the one that countrymen speak, in Newfoundland (The Shipping News), in Wyoming (Brokeback Mountain, Close Range: Wyoming Stories, Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2).
He gets up, scratching the grey wedge of belly and pubic hair, shuffles to the glass burner, pours leftover coffee in a chipped enamel pan; the flame swathes it in blue.

Annie Proulx's vision is far from romantic - it's as rough as countrymen are. There is no place for illusions in her approach. There is a traditional milieu, and these rough guys are very conservative and very stubborn, only life is rough and stubborn too and claims its rights against the whole world.

He turns on the tap and urinates in the sink, pulls on his shirt and jeans, his worn boots, stamping the heels against the floor to get them full on.

And still, there is kind of warmth, kind of sympathy, in her rough stories - for these poor guys who are forced by their own nature to live their own real, against all odds.

He might have to stay with his married daughter until he picks another job, yet he is suffused with a sense of pleasure because Jack Twist was in his dream.

Today it's her birthday.

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