Cold Mountain
Author: Charles Frazier
Winner of the 1997 National Book Award
A New York Times and Globe and Mail Notable Book of the Year
Charles Frazier has created a masterpiece that is at once an enthralling adventure, a stirring love story, and a luminous evocation of a vanished land, a place where savagery coexists with splendour and human beings contend with the inhuman solitude of the wilderness. Sorely wounded and fatally disillusioned in the fighting at Petersburg, Inman, a Confederate soldier, decides to walk back to his home in the Blue Ridge mountains and to Ada, the woman he loved there years before. His trek across the disintegrating South brings him into intimate and sometimes lethal converse with slaves and marauders, bounty hunters and witches, both helpful and malign. At the same time, the intrepid Ada is trying to revive her father's derelict farm and learning to survive in a world where the old certainties have been swept away.As it interweaves their stories, Cold Mountain asserts itself as an authentic odyssey, hugely powerful, majestically lovely, and keenly moving.
San Francisco Chronicle
Charles Frazier's first novel is a rare and extraordinary book, a Civil War novel concerned less with battlefields than with the landscape of the human soul.
Raleigh News & Observer
A masterpiece.
Publishers Weekly
Rich in evocative physical detail and timeless human insight, this debut novel set in the Civil War era rural South considers themes both grand (humanity's place in nature) and intimate (a love affair transformed by the war) as a wounded soldier makes his way home to the highlands of North Carolina and to his pre-war sweetheart. Shot in the neck during fighting at Petersburg, Inman was not expected to survive. After regaining the strength to walk, he begins his dangerous odyssey. Just as the traumas of life on the battlefront have changed Inman, the war's new social and economic conditions have left their mark on Ada. With the death of her father and loss of income from his investments, Ada can no longer remain a pampered Charleston lady, but must eke out a living from her father's farm in the Cold Mountain community, where she is an outsider.
Frazier vividly depicts the rough and varied terrain of Inman's travels and the colorful characters he meets, all the while avoiding Federal raiders and the equally brutal Home Guard. The sweeping cycle of Inman's homeward journey is deftly balanced by Ada's growing sense of herself and her connection to the natural world around the farm. In a leisurely, literate narrative, Frazier shows how lives of soldiers and of civilians alike deepen and are transformed as a direct consequence of the war's tragedy. There is quiet drama in the tensions that unfold as Inman and Ada come ever closer to reunion, yet farther from their former selves.
Library Journal
This monumental novel is set at the end of the Civil War and follows the journey of a wounded Confederate soldier named Inman as he returns home. Interwoven is the story of Ada, the woman he loves. Ada, who was raised in genteel society, cannot cope with the rigors of war until a woman called Ruby arrives to help her. Inman comes across memorable characters like the goatwoman, who lives off the secret herbs in the woods and Sara, a woman stranded with an infant who is assaulted by Yankee soldiers whom Inman later kills. After a long, threatening journey, Inman finally arrives home to Ada, 'ravaged, worn ragged and wary and thin.' A remarkable effort that opens up a historical past that will enrich readers not only with its story but with its strong characters. -- David A. Beron, University of New England, Biddeford, Maine
Library Journal
This monumental novel is set at the end of the Civil War and follows the journey of a wounded Confederate soldier named Inman as he returns home. Interwoven is the story of Ada, the woman he loves. Ada, who was raised in genteel society, cannot cope with the rigors of war until a woman called Ruby arrives to help her. Inman comes across memorable characters like the goatwoman, who lives off the secret herbs in the woods and Sara, a woman stranded with an infant who is assaulted by Yankee soldiers whom Inman later kills. After a long, threatening journey, Inman finally arrives home to Ada, 'ravaged, worn ragged and wary and thin.' A remarkable effort that opens up a historical past that will enrich readers not only with its story but with its strong characters. -- David A. Beron, University of New England, Biddeford, Maine
School Library Journal
A Civil War soldier and a lonely woman embark on parallel journeys of danger and discovery. Environment, events, and the empathy of others transform the protagonists spiritually as well as physically.
Deborah Stevenson
This 'novel is set at the end of the Civil War and follows the journey of a wounded Confederate soldier named Inman as he returns home. Interwoven is the story of Ada, the woman he loves. Ada, who was raised in genteel society, cannot cope with the rigors of farm life until a woman called Ruby arrives to help her.' -- Library Journal
Raleigh News & Observer
A masterpiece.
Jonathan Miles
My immediate impression, upon reading the first 30 or so pages of this debut novel, was that Charles Frazier has a stunning talent for aping Cormac McCarthy. A great many of McCarthy's stylistic earmarks -- especially the leaner, less baroque McCarthy of recent years -- are present here: keen-eyed and exacting descriptions of landscape and flora; grim and spare dialogue devoid of quotation marks; flurries of neologisms; and a deliberately paced, vigorous yet elegant narrative voice that yearns to be read by oil lamp. Venture 30 pages further in, however, and your impression changes: Charles Frazier may be picking the coins out of Cormac McCarthy's pockets, but my God what a novel he has made from them.
Set in North Carolina in the waning days of the Civil War, Cold Mountain tells the story of Inman, a wounded Confederate infantryman, and Ada, the woman for whom he abandons the front and embarks on an anguished odyssey home. Inman's footpath through the bruised landscape of the South is interwoven with Ada's struggle to eke out an existence on her late father's farm at Cold Mountain. Into both their lives enter fellow victims of war and heartbreak: Ruby, a butchy young drifter who directs Ada in the way of moon signs and root doctoring and tending to a farm; Stobrod, Ruby's no 'count father who, amidst the ugly debris of war, discovers the beauty of music and is thus redeemed; and a vividly depicted panoply of deserters, guardsmen, lechers, blind men, banjoists, war widows, goat herders and corpses.
At the novel's start, when Inman begins his journey, Ada is neither his wife nor his lover; their prewar meetings are recounted as awkward affairs, as tentative and demure as the courtings in Victorian novels. Amid the operatic passion of war, then, their innocence takes on a sort of crazed charm, and despite the severe experiences that precede their reunion, their love remains beyond the reach of the war. Even at the height of their affair, when Ada is first undressing before Inman, this innocence stands: Trying to remove a pair of hunter's pants, Ada cowhops from leg to leg, her ankle caught in the pantleg. It would take the bulk of a thousand paperback romances to produce a scene so endearing.
Frazier may be indebted to McCarthy, but Cold Mountain evokes other writers as well -- among them Stendahl, Tolstoy and Stephen Crane. If living in a tragic land is equal to living in a tragic time, as Wallace Stevens proposed, then Frazier's novel, like the best Civil War literature, explores what it means to exist in both. Despite its stylistic echoes, Cold Mountain is an intensely moving novel, a spare but eloquent exegesis on love and war. The story of Inman and Ada will remain with you long after the oil lamp is extinguished. --SalonJune 19, 1997
Kirkus Reviews
A grim story about a tough, resourceful Southern family in the Civil War is somewhat submerged by the weight of lyrical detail piled on the tale, and by the slow pace of the telling. There's no doubt that Frazier can write; the problem is that he stops so often to savor the sheer pleasure of the act of writing in this debut effort.
Inman, seeing that the end of the war is near, decides to leave his regiment and go back home to Ada, the bright, stubborn woman he loves. His adventures traversing a chaotic, impoverished land, Ada's struggles to preserve her father's farm, and the harsh, often powerful tales of the rough-hewn individuals they encounter take up most of the narrative.
The tragic climax is convincing but somewhat rushed, given the many dilatory scenes that have preceded it. Frazier has Cormac McCarthy's gift for rendering the pitch and tang of regional speech, and for catching some of the true oddity of human nature, but he doesn't yet possess McCarthy's ferocious focus. A promising but overlong, uneven debut.
What People Are Saying
Kaye Gibbons
Cold Mountain is the best Civil War novel since Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels. Written in a style equal to that of Shelby Foote, this novel deserves any and all prizes that might be lying about.
Willie Morris
Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain is the most impressive and enthralling first novel I have read in a long time. It is a magnetic story, ambitious in scope, with richly developed characters and beautiful evocations of landscape. Though set in an earlier time, it is contemporary in the profoundest sense, with resonance of A Farewell to Arms.
John Berendt
Cold Mountain is a heartbreakingly beautiful story, elegantly told and utterly convincing down the last haunting detail.
Rick Bass
This novel is so magnificent—in every conceivable aspect, and others previously unimagined—that it has occurred to me that the shadow of this book, and the joy I received in reading it, will fall over every other book I ever read. It seems even possible to never want to read another book, so wonderful is this one. Cold Mountain is one of the great accomplishments in American literature.
Ann Beattie
Charles Frazier's novel is at once spare and eloquent, a panorama that the author stills long enough to make a portrait—a very evocative portrait of Inman, a soldier who is trying to escape a ruined world. Interspersed with so many moments of sadness, the many moments of compassion see entirely convincing and are very affecting; when Ada 'wanted to tell him how she had come to be what she was,' the understatement—as it is so often in Cold Mountain—is almost shattering. And then comes the ending.
Kaye Gibbons
Cold Mountain is the best Civil War novel since Michaels Shaara's The Killer Angels. Written in a style equal to that of Shelby Foote, this novel deserves any and all prizes that might be lying about.
Rick Bass
This novel is so magnificent -- in every conceivable aspect, and others previously unimagined -- that it has occured to me that the shadows of this book, and the joy I received in reading it, will reach far over every other book I ever read. It seems even possible to never want to read another book, so wonderful is this one. Cold Mountain is one of the great accomplishments in America.
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