Thursday, February 2, 2012

With a side of random

The book I’m reading is called Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier. I have to say, it’s a good book but it’s no hunger games. To be honest, you eventually drift off and fall asleep from your book. That is what I get from some scenes in the book. Besides that, I’m okay with this book.
Cold Mountain is the story of Inman, a wounded and soul-sick Confederate soldier who, like his literary fellow-traveler Odysseus, has quit the field of battle only to find the way home littered with impediments and prowled by adversaries. Inman's Penelope is Ada, a headstrong belle who has forsaken her place in Charleston society in order to accompany her father -- a tubercular southern gentleman turned missionary -- to a new home in the healthy mountain air of North Carolina. Frazier divides the narrative between Inman's homeward progress and Ada's struggle to make it on her own after her father dies, establishing an underlying tension that is at once subtle and irresistible. 
Inman is critically wounded in the fighting outside Petersburg and, after a rough triage; he is "classed among the dying and put on a cot to do so." When his body stubbornly refuses to comply, he is evacuated further south to a hospital where he may succumb at his leisure. But against all odds, Inman's terrible injury insists upon healing itself. During the long months of convalescence he struggles to shed the hated, insulating numbness put on against the carnage he has seen -- Malvern Hill, Sharpsburg, Petersburg, Fredericksburg -- and probes his psychic wounds for the shrapnel of his former self. He finds instead a refuge in the "topography of home in his head" and the Cherokee folk tales of his childhood friend Swimmer: 

"As Inman sat brooding and pining for his lost self, one of Swimmer's creekside stories rushed into his memory with great urgency and attractiveness. Swimmer claimed that above the blue vault of heaven there was a forest inhabited by a celestial race. Men could not go there to stay and live, but in that high land the dead spirit could be reborn. This is all I know so far, I still haven’t finished the whole book, but I look forward to the end.

1 comment:

  1. Good post! Although you said this story may make you fall asleep, the details you included about it really interested me!

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