Rating: 
Summary: PLEASE Read...Tips to Conquering "Cold Mountain"
Review: I consider myself a pretty sophisticated reader. But I share many of the same sentiments others have about the titanic struggle to conquer "Cold Mountain." "Cold Mountain" has two primary stories. The first is about a wounded Civil War deserter named Inman who spends much of his time wandering home, facing obstacles to return to a beloved woman he hasn't seen in years. The second is about this beloved Ada and her friend Ruby, who transform the land upon which they live into a self-sufficient farm. Flashbacks recall things as they were between Inman and Ada before the war. These memories drive Inman home. Will he make it? If he does, will Ada remember? If she remembers, will she return his love? If these parallel stories intersect, will there be a good payoff? I wish what I've described was as simple as the book. "Cold Mountain" reads like a reflective diary with microscopic details that do little to drive this plot quickly forward. Worse, UNLIKE a diary, it's told in the third person. It's not, "I thought this" or "I did that." It's "Inman thought this" and "Ada felt that." Yet this isn't a dumb book. Unconventional and ambitious, yes, but trash this isn't. But who wants to read something that feels like work? I wondered, "why am I torturing myself?" Just to prove I can do it because it won a big-time award? Just to be a pseudo-intellectual hot-shot? Of course I don't want an easy, dumbed-down read, but I don't want a biology, geology or botany lesson on every page. Yet I finished "Cold Mountain." So why am I still giving it four stars? First, some tips about how I got through it. Just like a mountain that can only be conquered in little steps, "Cold Mountain" requires, even for sophisticated readers, a level of concentration I haven't devoted to any book since college. Do NOT be distracted by noise, lest you be sent backward a few sentences or worse, a few paragraphs or pages. Savor the meaning of one sentence at a time. Go slow and read no more than one chapter per sitting. But keep at it. Don't stop in the middle of a chapter. You don't want to go back because you forgot where you left off. But if you start daydreaming about your job or a trip to the food court, stop. Using this "disciplined" method of tackling "Cold Mountain" - by the time I got about a quarter of the way through - I started discovering TWO reasons why this book achieves excellence, albeit the kind that will forever polarize readers, and rightly so. FIRST, "Cold Mountain" is a purposely challenging and romantic (yes it is), novel with many bloody, grimy and depressing details. It's difficult because it has none of the sentence structure with which we're accustomed. But my negative attitude began to shift when I realized the novel is written like an old museum relic, the only surviving account of thoughts from a random dead narrator from the 1860s. Author Charles Frazier has accomplished the near impossible, recreating a style of historic writing that feels as Greek as reading Jane Austen or Shakespeare for the first time. Everything animal, mineral and vegetable is given character. The mood is beyond melancholy, and there's danger around every corner. Nothing feels certain. SECOND, I began noticing, and not in any pretentious way, that every page in "Cold Mountain" had at least one or two nuggets of information made more beautiful through the eyes of a 19th century narrator ignorant of the 21st century. Stuff like: "All that night the aurora flamed - and (the men) vied to see - who could most convincingly render its meaning down into plain speech." "(Describing a mentally challenged young man): Everything he saw was (newly) minted, and thus every day was a parade of wonders." "(Inman as he inspects a freshly covered grave): If (there's) a world beyond the grave as (the) hymns claim, such a hole (seems) a grim and lonesome portal to it." I think most who dislike "Cold Mountain" are rightfully reacting to its tedious historical style and structure rather than the story that lurks within its pages. But I also think, because I had the same negative reaction initially, that approaching this novel with more discipline, you might come away with greater respect for Frazier's ambitious effort to take a conventional romantic story and have it "re-told" - 19th century style - hence feeling unconventional compared to what's found in most present day bestsellers. It just stands out. I'm glad I gave it another shot.
Rating: 
Summary: Pastoral Squalor
Review: I very much enjoyed the vivid description of rough life in the rural South. That aspect was thoroughly convincing to me. However, the book's rare action sequences seemed to be inspired largely by the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs. (ERB is a guilty pleasure of mine, but I can't take him seriously.) In short, I felt let down, given the awards and critical acclaim "Cold Mountain" has received, but I still give it a qualified thumbs-up.
Rating: 
Summary: After four years, still under its spell
Review: I keep coming back to this book, year after year. I loved it on my first reading because I became immersed in its Civil War era Southern world, and because I fell in love with the brave, although wounded and despairing, character of Inman, a weary and scarred Confederate soldier who sets out for home, Cold Mountain. I found the starkness and sometimes strangeness of the events along his journey spellbinding. The Appalachian mountain folklore and mystery of the book took me deeper into its themes on later readings, and in my current reading, I am struck by a different perspective on the plot - the situations into which he comes in his travels are stories in themselves, and Inman often arrives as if called at a moment in which he is urgently needed or being sought. To him, these encounters are at best necessary delays, and more often impediments to his progress, but in looking back from the end of the journey, they are the real and telling events of his life, and the mark he leaves in passing becomes his legacy. I could write as much about the parallel story of Ada, who awaits Inman's coming and has her own quiet but urgent tale of survival, and about a number of other characters I love, if space allowed. Charles Frazier uses language that has a beautiful plainness and strongly evokes the place and time of the story, each word seeming to carry a world of meaning, and all of them flowing with the clarity and music of a mountain stream. I like to read passages of it out loud, and I highly recommend the unabridged audio version narrated by the author, whose voice exactly fits the telling of this story. I also recommend a CD called Songs from the Mountain, a recording of old time music inspired by the novel that hauntingly captures its moods. If you are interested in Civil War America, Southern culture, guns, horses, romance, Appalachian mountain lore, nature, witchcraft ... or just a great story that may keep you pondering for years, I recommend Cold Mountain to you.
Rating:
Summary: Gripping Read...Yet Disappointing & Ultimately Unrealistic
Review: Again, I chose to read a novel that I had heard for years was wonderful. Plus, it won an award. The writing style was fine, descriptions were excellent, pace was good, characters well-developed, and I was kept up late at night reading it...but ultimately I was left feeling cheated. The ending read like a movie, and there was too too much unrealistic and unbalanced evil, and the love story seemed a bit too sappy in relation to the other events in the book. It just wasn't believable to me.
Rating:
Summary: The Odyssey of a Confederate oldier and his Penelope
Review: COLD MOUNTAIN by Charles Frazier is a book I read for our book club, and though I wouldn't have chosen it, I ended up really enjoying it. The writing is beautiful, and the story is built on or inspired by The Odyssey. (I found it a more artistic "inspiration" novel than "The Hours" that was inspired by "Mrs. Dalloway." That novel almost stole things outright from Woolf. Frazier is able to incorporate very rich and meaningful references to underscore the archetypal aspects of the Odyssey without relying so much on it that his own insight and work is cheapened.) Inman is a man from Cold Mountain who has served as a soldier for the Confederacy. After being wounded, he walks out of the hospital and intends making the long trek home. His adventures call to mind incidents from Homer's Odyssey, such as the Lotus Eaters and the killing of the Sun God's cattle (this scene, which
substitutes a bear for the cows, is painfully sad and after everything, I found it almost unbearable). Ada is the woman Inman has left behind. They have only flirted, but their connection is real and powerful enough for him to think of her on his long trek home. She is Penelope to a degree, and there is a brief allusion to the suitors who eat her out of house and home. She makes an agreement with a woman who helps her manage her farm and lives there, but is NOT a servant. Ada, the daughter of the parish's late minister, has realized that her finishing school and painting lessons have not helped her to manage the house and farm on her own. She and Ruby work the land to make something of it. The overwhelming feeling of this novel is sadness and loss. The poverty of the South during (at the end of) the war is palpable on every page. There is also a theme that it is the poverty and baseness of the lowlands that Inman is trying to escape to the lush, safety of the mountains. The writing is beautiful. There is a scene of a gunfight on horses and one white horse goes down and struggles "like the ghost of a horse" writes Frazier. You can find passages like that on every page.
Rating:
Summary: Please read this before going further
Review: The book has apparently made it onto the school reading lists of some of our younger readers, and this has had the unfortunate byproduct of poor reviews here. This is a fantastic piece of literature, calling to mind both the Odyssey and Huckleberry Finn. It is a gripping and well-written account of a difficult time in our nation's history. Its descriptiveness may be lost on our youth, with their television-damaged attention spans, but it is exactly that descriptiveness that allows the serious reader to get lost within the story.
As an additional warning, there is a review below from a reader in Maryland that contains a spoiler of the book's ending. I made the mistake of reading that review before finishing the novel, and found that I had been done a disservice by that reviewer.
Rating:
Summary: Beautifully written and thoughtful...
Review: Contrary to the other negative reviews on this book, I absolutely loved reading this book. I thought it was beautifully written, the words so rich and palpable that I could taste the Southern world created by Frazier. It's definitely not a quick read, definitely not about the Civil War and not a fast-paced story. But what it does offer is a beautiful story about two lovers who, due to unfortunate circumstances and bad timing, do not realize how much they mean to each other until it's too late. There are also other interesting stories along the way where Inman, the male protagonist meets plenty of different, amusing characters. This book isn't for everyone but there are ample rewards to those who are patient and read it to the end.
Rating: 
Summary: Very, very slow...
Review: I never give up on a book after I've started it, but this one was tough to stick with. Some readers do love pages and pages of repetitive landscape description, but I actually like for things to happen in a book. I was 200 pages in before I was even interested. I didn't really feel the romance, either. For most of the book, the characters were pretty much unconnected. You would barely think they knew each other. I enjoyed about the last 50 pages or so. I don't discourage anyone not to read it, but be prepared for a long, long trip.
Rating:
Summary: Painful
Review: I read this book on the recommendation of several people whose opinion I greatly respect. However, I found it to be painful and very slow-going. Frazier seems caught up in gory descriptions of wounds and general civil war gore, rather than quiet yet meaningful relationships. His writing style of using dashes instead of quotation marks to indicate speech made conversations drone on in a lifeless way. It was painful to read this book.
Rating:
Summary: Beautiful
Review: This book was probably the best written and most beautiful book I've ever read. I've talked to no one who didn't love it- men and women. In fact, most people that I've lent the book to eventually went out and purchased their own copy. The book draws you into a world that is so different from ours today that it is hard to imagine that we live on the same land the book takes place. Frazier illustrates our inherent will to survive through the eyes of two characters that are full of life and vigor. However, be forewarned that it is no action-novel. Instead, it is a gourmet delight to be sipped slowly like a fine wine.
| 
