Just finished Cold Mountain. I’d been trying to get around to it for years, since everyone, but everyone was reading it and I live in the state in question.
It finally took the movie (haven’t seen), and my own interminable trip to get it read and I have this to say…
Bleah. I mean, it was OK. I liked all the bits about food, but it hardly seemed monumental. The two lead characters barely seemed to be thinking about each other. Reading the book was very like Inman’s journey, another page…sigh…another page…stare out car window…another page…rub neck.
I’m sure this marks me out as uncultured and lacking in aesthetic sensibilities, but when I got to the end I was so angry, I was ready to find Charles Frazier and choose one of the awful deaths from the book to inflict upon him. You made me slog through all that, you let Stobrod survive a firing squad, and you couldn’t let Inman live!!! ??? AAAAA!
You’re not the first reader to decry the ending. It’s certainly been discussed here before.
I myself found Inman’s journey interesting and well written, loved his descriptions of the land. However, IMHO, the ending was a bit of a cop-out. I don’t need tidy, happy endings–that’s not what I’m talking about.
It just felt as if Frazier did not know what to do with Inman and Ada after their reunion, so off Inman went, leaving the reader a bit deflated, with no chance of seeing this rather abstract relationship become real.
I wish I had known that when I tried to read the book. I might have managed to finish with that to look forward to.
I thought the book was very dull. I quit reading it about half way through. I almost never quit reading a book half way through and I read quite a lot.
I wasn’t blown away by the book either: it’s one of those cases where the movie is actually better. I think what irritated me more than the clichès and general ponderousness though was the (I suppose artistic) absence of quotation marks to illustrate that a character was TALKING rather than just thinking; there were several passages I had to re-read because I couldn’t tell if this was a conversation or a character’s surmisal.
[MiniRant]One of my least favorite clichès and one of the most overused, incidentally: doomed lovers have sex one time and from that sex a child is born. Evidently women are just a heckuva lot more fertile if the guy is about to die. If ROMEO & JULIET had been written in the 20th century she’d have survived the crypt and given birth 9 months later to little Romeolina Montague. (I was amazed that TITANIC didn’t end with Rose pregnant and it was a much better movie because of it.)[/MiniRant]
Not really saying I liked the ending, but I prefered that it ended with Inman’s death then yet ANOTHER near-fatal wounding.
I mean, Inman gets shot how many times over the course of the book and always bounces back? To let him survive yet again would just seem cheap, in my opinion.
Frazier chose an interesting method for sustaining the connection between Inman and Ada throughout both character’s individual journeys. At first, I thought the toned-down, less pining away for each other approach was a little disconnected from reality, but after I finished the book, I realized, arguably, that Inman may have been more concerned with getting home and as far away from the war and the people that had made it as he could. He’d been so desensitized (i.e. continual references to to what he’d seen at Fredericksburg, notably) by the war that possibly Ada was still a warm memory but not entirely at the forefront of his motivation to return to Cold Mountain.
I watched Minghella’s adaptation (the 2003 movie) and thought he did very well by knitting together the story’s main conflicts and including the highlights of the book. But I found he placed more emphasis on Inman and Ada’s longing to be reunited than was present in the book. I hate to blame him for using a more “Hollywood” appeal to the public, but I couldn’t help coming away with that feeling to some degree.
Overall, great story, characters, and lyrical narration (in the book). The movie succeeded in tapping into the darker side of the book’s undercurrent. Great imagery shared by both mediums.
I guess I am in the minority here (as usual). I saw the movie first, loved it and got the book. Read it cover to cover in one night, love love LOVED it.
I thought the cdharacters were lovely, and gave me a peek into the past. Both movie & book get a 10 from me, and that doesn’t happen often.
I made it to page 200 before packing it in. 20 pages of plot, 180 pages of lyrically descriptive scenery. Ick. I’ve never bothered with the movie considering how little I thought of the book.
Now that somebody else has reopened this thread . . .
Frazier’s new book Nightwoods has just been released to middling reviews. While W.S. Lyon in BookPage compares it to Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God, the description sounds to me more like Davis Grubb’s Night of the Hunter (from which the Robert Mitchum movie was made).
I was all set to love this book, but you did better than me. I couldn’t even finish it. BORING. The movie was better which is a coup for Hollywood.
What I do anymore is read a few random paragraphs in a book before I devote my time to it, no matter what other people say about it. I can usually tell by that if I like the writer’s style. Some people could make the end of the world ho-hum, and some can make learning to tie your shoes engrossing.
This is one of the books that my husband read aloud to me. It was so gracefully written that we took a little side trip to Cold Mountain when we were in North Carolina. I have also been to a Sacred Harp singing at Belmont University since I saw the movie and was just overwhelmed by its uniqueness and beauty.
Only watched the film because it had Jack White in it.
Thought the book had to be better. Thanks to a five hour flight delay, I made it to the end of the book. By then I would have gleefully shot Inman myself.
Ooh, scenery. Ooh, mans inhumanity to man. Ooh, pig fat.
