Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Cold Mountain
Book Review: Structurally unsound, cliché ridden, an obvious trajectory
Summary: 1 Stars
Cold Mountain is an unfortunate novel. It is unfortunate it won the National Book award (why did it win?). The novel has an unfortunate structure; Fraser simply strings along one incident after another, with little connecting thread. The weight of flashbacks alone drags the novel to the ground (and it hardly gets off the ground in the first place!) There are glaring anachronisms. It is difficult to believe that some of the sentiments he puts in his characters mouths could have been uttered in 1864. This is a forgivable sin, if the novel is well written, if it rises about the banal, if it offers something more than surface. But this novel is all surfaces and all banality. Its publication is indicative of some of the pathology of today's publishing world (this will be a BIG novel, this will become a BIGGER film, which will sell more of this BIG novel). Too bad for us the novel does not justify the claims of its promoters. Fraser's eight million dollar advance for his next work is probably a clarion signal of another BIG novel to come.Book Review: The Undiscovered Country
Summary: 4 Stars
Immense and reaching in its ambition, dense in its verbiage and sense of character and place, chilly in its view of life and man's fate, "Cold Mountain" is aptly titled, even if most of it weren't set on a steep North Carolina promontory of that name.
Inman, a soldier in the Confederate Army during the War Between the States, has had enough. Wounded, he escapes from the hospital rather than return to action for a cause he doesn't especially believe in and knows to be lost. Back in his home in the hills of North Carolina lives Ada, the minister's daughter Inman kissed before marching off. Does she share his ardor still, and wait for him as he treks across hard country to be with her?
Charles Frazier's story doesn't have much of a plot. It rather consciously if loosely evokes Homer's "Odyssey" just like James Joyce and the Coen Brothers did. Inman is captured on his journey by oddly beguiling women who lull him much the way the Sirens did Ulysses. In a series of chapters alternating with those depicting Ada on the home front, we see him either embroiled in other similarly evanescent incidents or hearing stories from here-and-gone characters that testify to the epic sense of life and tragedy that imbues Frazier's novel.
"What the music said was that there is a right way for things to be ordered so that life might not always be just tangle and drift but have a shape, an aim," Frazier writes as Ada listens to a vagabond fiddle player. "It was a powerful argument against the notion that things just happen."
On the other side of that equation is everything else in "Cold Mountain," parted lovers, starving babies, casualties of war, even a drake stranded in a pond growing icy with winter. The constant presence of war and death are not there for narrative tension but as a lens to a human condition that has scarcely succeeded in discovering anything else, despite all possible good intentions. Not a page of this novel isn't drenched in some sort of misery. That makes for tough going, as does a central storyline at times uninvolving.
What makes "Cold Mountain" so special is Frazier's descriptive language. You simply haven't read a book quite like this before. Certainly I haven't, and I've read a few. James Joyce once claimed his gift for language was such there wasn't any earthly concept he had to strain at presenting in prose, and Frazier has that gift more than anyone I've read, Joyce included.
Nature indeed is more of a character in "Cold Mountain" than any human barring Ada, Inman, and Ada's companion Ruby. The world around these characters is a constant reference point, and Frazier often takes entire pages describing birds roosting on dog hobble, or the slaughter of pigs. It's a world more than a hundred years old, and I wonder if it ever existed in reality half as firmly as it does in Frazier's head.
There's some nice glimpses into the human condition, too, though mostly via the natural world: "Marrying a woman for her beauty makes no more sense than eating a bird for its singing," observes one crone who Inman meets tending goats.
"Cold Mountain" is a daunting tutorial for anyone who wants to pursue fiction as a career, with the caveat being you don't have to be quite as descriptive as Frazier. In fact, Frazier's descriptiveness holds the book down somewhat in terms of story (a movie based on this book tried nobly but suffered from the fact the book exists to be read, not adapted for the screen). It's just that the descriptiveness works so well for him.
In fact, "Cold Mountain" is a marvel of artistry in the way it conjures what it does, making you feel you walked with Inman and waited with Ada though every lived-in page. It's not for every casual reader, but if writing is something you take seriously, budget yourself some time and read it.
Book Review: Ultimately Left Me Cold
Summary: 2 Stars
Wounded while fighting in the Civil War, Inman, a Confederate soldier, decides to leave the hospital and walk to his home in the Blue Ridge Mountains to find Ada Munroe, the woman he loved before heading off to war. His journey will be an epic one filled with danger, death, and destruction. As he trudges towards her, Ada is in a struggle of her own - a struggle to revive her deceased father's farm and survive in a world brutalized by war.
While it had some good moments "Cold Mountain" ultimately failed to move me. It is very slow paced and at times I wondered when something was going to happen only to realize that plenty had happened including murder but it wasn't exciting enough to keep me interested. Author Charles Frazier does do a good job of depicting how horrible the Civil War was for those who fought it and for those left behind who never knew when soldiers might come and take their homes. In the end there is plenty of violence in the book, but it is written about so matter of factly that there's no emotional involvement for the reader. Frazier does create memorable characters; although Inman is a little too good and resourceful a character and Ada left me cold. Ruby is the standout character - a strong no-nonsense woman. While the focus of the book is supposed to be the love story between Inman and Ada, I felt that it wasn't developed enough and I never felt that the two of them really loved each other. Frazier tries hard by putting in some flashbacks showing how they met and their relationship before the war, but the flashbacks felt awkwardly placed and written. Finally, the ending seemed like a cop out.
"Cold Mountain" had its moments, but ultimately left me cold.
Book Review: Where Are The Banners and the Flags?
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a book that tells what the Civil War was really like. None of that emotional rhetoric and stirring drum and bugle stuff. This was life. Most southerners didn't have slaves, most didn't want the war and most were caught up in a world and circumstances they wanted no part of, but could not control and barely influence.
They were not disloyalists. They were not traitors. Just people trying to scratch out a way to get by. This book is exceptional in describing and detailing those lives and the horrors brought on by an especiallly brutal war.
Read this book, then, talk about the glories of war and the Glorious Lost Cause!! I can't be done!!