Tampa Book Buzz

online book club review:cold mountain by charles frazier

Reading Charles Frazier’s book Cold Mountain made me glad I had seen the movie first. Otherwise I wouldn’t have have truly appreciated the love story between the main characters Ada and Inman or fully understood the less-than-happily-ever-after ending.

Inman is a Confederate soldier who gets severely injured in Petersburg and becomes disheartened and disillusioned with the war, himself, and life in general. He clings to the memory of Ada, the woman he left behind at home in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Their developing romance was new and incomplete, but it gives Inman something to live for and a reason to walk away from the war towards home. Cold Mountain is Inman’s Odyssey-like journey home.

Back home, Ada and others are suffering from shortages — of food, of money, of men to plow the fields, and of hope. She, too, relies on her memories of better times with Inman to sustain her and give her the strength to survive.

Frazier’s descriptions allow the reader to see the beauty of North Carolina and to hear and smell the brutality of war. The phrase “…a late summer so hot and wet that the air both day and night felt like breathing through a dishrag…” brought back many memories for this south Georgia girl. You have to read Cold Mountain at a slower pace than usual, which mimics Inman’s slow journey on foot through the summer heat and dust.

However, the slow pacing and detailed descriptions stripped the ending of its emotional impact. The movie version touched me, while the book merely entertained me.

What did you think?