Much like Ada Monroe picked at “Adam Bede” like a child picks at food on a dinner plate, I picked through “Cold Mountain” over a period of about six months. I was still in school when I started it, so there was much reading to be done on various subjects, from Archeology to Vietnam war history. I also read The Lord of the Rings trilogy during a break from reading “Cold Mountain.” I also read “Diary” by Chuck Palahniuk. But, tonight I finally finished Charles Frazier’s take on the Odyssey.
It wasn’t that the book bored me. It didn’t. Perhaps it had something to do with having seen the film adaptation already, but I don’t think it was that, either. I think the book was just slow, and demanded a slow read. The events in the book unfold as events in life often do, without identifiable pattern and without concern for the subject of the event. I enjoyed the book thoroughly, and found it to be an especially enjoyable period piece. Frazier uses even the language of the seceded South (or at least, what we accept to be the language of said period and place) to evoke a landscape and culture entirely believable and yet gritty with drama.
I don’t have much else to say about it, other than that I’d like to include a few passages which I found particularly poignant:
She (Ada) marked her place with a yarrow stem and closed the book and set it in her lap. She wondered if literature might lose some of its interest when she reached an age or state of mind where her life was set on such a sure course that the things she read might stop seeming so powerfully like alternate directions for her being.
This sadly struck a chord with me because I do take what I read to heart, and often try to apply morals and wisdom contained in books to my own life. Will fantastic worlds no longer hold their appeal as more and more of the life I fantasized about slips behind me? Eh, maybe. See, I even took this passage to heart.
He (Inman) talked to her of the great waste of years between then and now. A long time gone. And it was pointless, he said, to think how those years could have been put to better use, for he could hardly have put them to worse.
Not that I nor Frazier was there, but I can imagine that the average Southerner might have felt along these lines after a couple of years of warring for the rich man’s right to own slaves. I know that’s not what it was entirely about, and most Southerner’s held no love for the Federals, but I must assume that many questioned what they were fighting for on the bloody battlefields of the Civil War.
They (Ada and Inman) were both at such an age that they stood on a cusp. They could think in one part of their minds that their whole lives stretched out before them without boundary or limit. At the same time another part guessed that youth was about over for them and what lay ahead was another country entirely, wherein the possibilities narrowed down moment by moment.
Now there’s a passage I can relate to. I had never really thought of it that way before, but youth is practically over for me. I mean, sure, I’ll still experience bouts of youthfulness on and off over the next 5-to-10 years, but never again will I have the boundless confidence of youth I once possessed. Not that loss of youth is the end of the world, but it’s definitely a cusp.
What am I saying, I’m 22. Not exactly an old man. But a lot has changed in the last 22 years…
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