Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier
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Book Reviews of Cold Mountain
Book Review: Racist Revisionism
Summary: 1 Stars
I originally purchased this novel because it was required reading for a grad class I was taking on Civil War literature. What was the instructor thinking? What was the AUTHOR thinking?
I don't see how other reviewers could be bored by this. I was livid. Yes, those who criticize the author's poor wording and lousy literary technique are correct, but how does that compare to an historical novel about the American Civil War that somehow forgets to include 6 million black people?
Wait. Make that five thousand, nine hundred, ninety-nine. There IS that moment when a slave tosses (wait for it...) a WATERMELON off the back of a wagon for our starving protagonist. Then he is gone again, and we are left focusing on white folk, as the writer clearly believes we should be.
On the surface, this is a love story about a po' Southern lad who is dragged away from his beloved in order to go to war, and returns, half-starved, AWOL, and lovelorn.
The overriding message, however, is that neither the Union nor the Confederacy was right or wrong. The whole thing was a terrible misunderstanding that could have been averted. This is pure claptrap, and for more than one reason.
First, the war was not a misunderstanding. The Northerners in Congress tried to end slavery as Britain did, by compensating the slave owners in order to set them free without financial loss. The slave owners wouldn't sell; there's no misunderstanding in that.
Second, since the war WAS about slavery, (not just in terms of right and wrong, but also in terms of whether the south would remain feudal, or whether it would advance, and the slaves join the workers in the north) unless you truly believe that slavery should have been permitted as long as southern white power brokers liked it, there IS a right side, and there IS a wrong side. If there was ever a war in American history worth fighting and dying for, this one was it, and the writer instead makes it sound senseless and meaningless.
I puzzled over what to do with my copy of Cold Mountain. I have never believed in book-burning, no matter how distasteful the material. If I gave it to charity, some poor fool might read it and be wrongly persuaded. Finally, I realized its true potential: I saved it for my history lectures and when I told students that any historian who tries to tell the story of the Civil War without mentioning black people was not to be trusted, I threw this book on the floor, HARD. It woke the students up quite nicely, and the abuse I heaped on this book--bought with my own money, after all, not the school district's--makes me feel much better.
If you want to toss a few bucks at a book that is badly written and historically misrepresentative, this should be its ultimate destination. On a frustrating day, you have something to throw, something to stomp on, something to mutilate. If you don't want to buy an item for that purpose, I'd advise you to save your money and for Civil War history, stick to Shaara and Foote...but never, no never Charles Frazier.
Book Review: A Long Way to Walk to Get Laid
Summary: 1 Stars
Inman, the protagonist, part Jeremiah Johnson, part the Outlaw Josey Wales, part John Muir, is one of the most ridiculously unbelievable characters in the history of modern fiction. He has no flaws. Temptations on the road?; he eschews them. Wrongs being exacted on the dispossessed?; he rectifies them, usually chivalrously or gallantly. Starving?; he finds food. Shot and buried alive?; he rises from his interment and staggers off. To the woman he loves, this preposterous beacon he's focused on. Frazier is what I call a flora and fauna novelist. He's one of those writers who has assiduously researched the time down to the tiniest fern, or snail. We admire his research. We admire his prose rendering of all this flora and fauna. But when you strip that away you're left with a story so absurd -- see the movie if you don't believe me -- that it defies credulity. Incontrovertibly, one of the most overrated novels of the past ten years. Don't believe me? Read his second book. This one-trick pony did a major face plant. He's finished now, of course. But he's got enough money for three lifetimes so he can drink himself into a stupor and never again have to write about all those plants and animals and cerulean skies. A great southern literary con.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: PACE!!--PACE!!--PACE!!
Summary: 1 Stars
I'M NOT SURE IF I AM ALLOWED TO USE THE WORD ""PACE"" IN A REVIEW.
WELL--HERE GOES---
THIS WAS THE SLOWEST, DRAGGING, BORING BOOK I HAVE EVER READ.
""ATLAS SHRUGGED"" FLEW BY---BY COMPARISON.
AND---IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN LONGER---BY ABOUT 80 TO 100 PAGES, I'D SAY.
WHEN INMAN DIES---THAT FUNERAL / BURIAL WOULD HAVE LASTED PAGE AFTER
PAGE AFTER PAGE AFTER . . .