` One of the greatest American writers` Independent From Annie Proulx, the Pulitzer Prize---winning author of The Shipping News & ” 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 & Charles Duquet, arrive in New France. Bound to a feudal lord, a ”seigneur, ” for three years in exchange for l&, 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 & their descendants live trapped between two inimical cultures. But Duquet, crafty & 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 & Duquet over three hundred years
- their travels across North America, to Europe, China, & New Zeal&, under stunningly brutal conditions; the revenge of rivals; accidents; pestilence; Indian attacks; & cultural annihilation. Over & 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 & hope
- that we follow them with fierce attention. Annie Proulx is one of the most formidable & compelling American writers, & Barkskins is her greatest novel, a magnificent marriage of history & imagination.