Cold Mountain: A Novel

By Charles Frazier

This is loosely a civil war book, but it really has the civil war as the back drop with this beautifully written, surprising, simple story right on top of that bleak context. The writing was absolutely unique and compelling. Often the language itself truly delighting me to where I laughed out loud or thought about some sentence for days.

In a strange way I felt this more as a love story. Between the main characters but also between each of them and the land, Cold Mountain. And woven in between was a story about the love of books. Next to the exploration of love was unearthing recovery. Recovering from war or putting it more broad, recovering from anything violent and painful. How do we stitch ourselves back together when life has exposed us to horrific and youth robbing experiences? With all naivete, all innocence gone, do we throw in the towel or fight to live anew regardless of the known loss?

"In his mind, Inman likened the swirling paths of vulture flight to the coffee grounds seeking pattern in his cup. Anyone could be oracle for the fortunes if a man dedicated himself to the idea that the future will inevitably be worse than the past and that time is a path leading nowhere but a place of deep and persistent threat. The way Inman saw it, if a thing like Fredricksburg was to be used as a marker of current position, then many years hence, at the rate we're going, we'll be eating one another raw." (pg. 16)

"He could not even make a start at reckoning up how many deaths he had witnessed of late. It would number, no doubt, in the thousands. Accomplished in every custom you could imagine, and some you couldn't come up with if you thought at it for days. He had grown so used to seeing death, walking among the dead, sleeping among them, numbering himself calmly as among the near-dead, that it seemed no longer dark and mysterious. He feared his heart had been touched by the firs so often he might never make a civilian again." (pg. 180)

"When he set the bow to the new fiddle, the tone was startling in its clrity, sharp and pure, and the redundancy in the tuning led to curious and dissonant harmonic effects. The tune was slow and modal, but demanding in its rhythm and of considerable range. More than that, its melody constantly pressed upon you the somber notion that is was a passing thing, here and gone, unfixable. Yearning was its main theme." (pg. 233 - 234)

"To Ada, though, it seemed akin to a miracle that Stobrod, of all people, should offer himself up as a proof positive that no matter what a waste one has made of one's life, it is ever possible to find some path to redemption, however partial." (pg. 234)

"Ada had tried to love all the year equally, with no discrimination against the greyness of winter, its smell of rotted leaves underfoot, the stillness in the woods and fields. Nevertheless, she could not get over loving autumn best, and she could not entirely overcome the sentimentality of finding poignancy in the fall of leaves, of seeing it as the conclusions to the year and therefore metaphoric, though she knew the seasons came around and around and had neither inauguration nor epilogue." (pg. 355)

http://www.amazon.com/Cold-Mountain-Novel-Charles-Frazier/dp/B001O9CBQM/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1234919780&sr=1-2