Annie Proulx

"Barkskins opens in New France in the late 18th century as Renae Sel, an illiterate woodsman makes his way from Northern France to the homeland to seek a living. Bound to a 'seigneur' for three years in exchange for land, he suffers extraordinary hardship and violence, always in awe of the forest he is charged with clearing. In the course of this epic novel, Proulx tells the stories of Renae's children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren, as well as the descendants of his friends and foes, as they travel back to Europe, to China, to New England, always in quest of a livelihood or fleeing stunningly brutal conditions--war, pestilence, Indian attacks, the revenge of rivals. 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. This is Proulx's most ambitious novel ever, and her master work"--

A Novel

Barkskins

Melody Izard

I thought I had read this more recently - how time flies when you don't review your books right after completion. 

Annie, Annie, Annie. I have to struggle with your lovely words with your tightly crafted characters with your complicated plot line. I'm often surrounded by stumps trying to decide what the heck happened to the forest. 

This is all indigenous people and their close connection to nature; all end of the natural world; all greedy, greedy people who just think of their wealth and wants and desires and little people be damn. Its a long, sad journey.

Tracey O’Rourke

This should have been an interesting family saga, that it never became. I was going to give it three stars but I was so disappointed by the ending that I downgraded. The story never added up to anything.

Ali Angco

Haley Murray

“Magnificent.” (Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See) From Annie Proulx, the Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning author of The Shipping News and “Brokeback Mountain” comes her masterwork: an epic, dazzling, violent, marvelously dramatic novel about the destruction of the world’s forests. In the late seventeenth century, two penniless young Frenchmen, René Sel and Charles Duquet, arrive in Canada, then known as New France. Bound to a feudal lord, a seigneur, for three years in exchange for land, they become woodcutters—barkskins. Sel 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 hostile cultures. 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 and cultural annihilation. Again and 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 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 superb marriage of history and imagination.

Barkskins A Novel

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