Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier

John R. Chapin, In the Trenches at Cold Harbor, 1890

(October 2) I found this a very powerful book -- very hard to read, actually -- I had to steel myself to it every time I read it, as much as I loved it, and I spoke to more than one person who found it too hard to finish. Pat said it was “too violent” which is true, but it’s not always man vs. man violence -- in fact, it’s much more just the regular violence of nature and what it’s like to live in the mountains in the 1860s in the middle of a war. Frazier is a graphic, vivid describer and can be heartless with the details. He plays hard ball. It makes the stakes high. I especially had to steel myself to read the ending, for you had no idea whether he would spare Inman and Ada.

It’s kind of picaresque, but there is this overarching form of Inman returning to Ada, a quest whose significance increases and becomes ever more gripping even though the two are apart for so long. It’s a clever device. The more time we spend with Ada and Inman, the more we get of their memories, which at the beginning don’t hint at the depth of the relationship. It’s definitely Odysseus returning to Penelope and his kingdom, but here the relationship is so much more the driving passion.

The vivid details of mid-19th-century life in the southern U.S. are amazing, totally engrossing. I feel like Frazier got the habits of speech right, too. There are oddnesses of expression and vocabulary that you see in letters and newspapers of the time.

Was surprised by some of the Penthouse scenes at the end. LOL

Had a great writing style in general… very rich. Anything Inman thinks or says is interesting (“a sermon of Monroe’s, dense to the point of clotting”) and on and on.

The love story -- so moving -- so excruciating -- like a Jane Austen parlour.

Gripping, bracing, all those words that convey high-tension wire binding you thrillingly to a dangerous ride.

A passage I found very profound: “And then she thought that you went on living one day after another, and in time you were somebody else, your previous self only like a close relative, a sister or brother, with whom you shared a past. But a different person, a separate life. Certainly neither she nor Inman were the people they had been the last time they were together. And she believed maybe she liked them both better now.”

The most treacherous, perfidious, soul-wrenching sentence I have ever read in a book: “Even after all this time and three children together, Ada still found them clasping each other at the oddest moments.” It was the first sentence of the epilogue, titled “October of 1874.”