Barkskins : Longlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction 2017

Resumen del libro

LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2017 A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR From Annie Proulx, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Shipping News and Brokeback Mountain, comes her masterwork: an epic, dazzling, violent, magnificently dramatic novel about the taking down of the world's forests. In the late seventeenth century two penniless young Frenchmen, Rene Sel and Charles Duquet, arrive in New France. Bound to a feudal lord, a "seigneur," for three years in exchange for land, they become wood-cutters - barkskins.

Rene suffers extraordinary hardship, oppressed by the forest he is charged with clearing. He is forced to marry a Mi'kmaw woman and their descendants live trapped between two inimical cultures. But Duquet, crafty and ruthless, runs away from the seigneur, becomes a fur trader, then sets up a timber business.

Proulx tells the stories of the descendants of Sel and Duquet over three hundred years - their travels across North America, to Europe, China, and New Zealand, under stunningly brutal conditions; the revenge of rivals; accidents; pestilence; Indian attacks; and cultural annihilation. Over and over again, they seize what they can of a presumed infinite resource, leaving the modern-day characters face to face with possible ecological collapse. Proulx's inimitable genius is her creation of characters who are so vivid - in their greed, lust, vengefulness, or their simple compassion and hope - that we follow them with fierce attention.

Annie Proulx is one of the most formidable and compelling American writers, and Barkskins is her greatest novel, a magnificent marriage of history and imagination.

Biografía del autor

Annie Proulx (Connecticut, 1935) irrumpió en el mundo literario en la cincuentena, pero lo hizo brillantemente. Su segunda novela, Atando cabos, fue llevada al cine, mereció el Pulitzer 1993 y el National Book Award, y cosechó un rotundo éxito de lectores. Le siguieron un volumen de cuentos, Canciones del corazón (1988), y dos novelas, Los crímenes del acordeón (1996) y Un as en la manga (2002). El relato Brokeback Mountain, convertido en película, volvió a llevarla a la actualidad.