Chilly hill

After weeks of chipping away at it, I finally finished Cold Mountain late last week. In all fairness, there were also a few weeks in there that it was lost under a pile of papers on our coffee table. You must be telling yourself, "Wow, this is such a thrilling book that she forgot she was reading it."

My grandmother lent it to me with the rousing endorsement that it was "kind of slow, but good." Who can't wait to get cracking on something with that review? I admit that I put it at the bottom of a stack of books 'to be read'. I did, however, have an interest in reading it because I'd picked up bits and pieces of the movie on TV one night and wanted to know the full story. Additionally, the Newsweek review on the cover touts the story as "Astonishing...a genuinely romantic saga that attains the status of literature."

I'm not really sure it was astonishing (still words on a page, read left to right, top to bottom, groups of words make sentences...nothing new here) and ultimately I knew the ending, so I'm a bad judge on that. The romance of the book could be estimated to really only show up in the last 1/4, but it definitely is a saga, or more epic, story, and I always want to educate myself with something classified as literature, because I read enough easy fiction. In the end, I figured that it would be akin to my experience with Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre and East of Eden; while I was reading them it was kind of a struggle, but after closing the back cover, I felt an immense satisfaction with passing the time that way and enjoyment in the classic tales.

With that, I began my journey. To quickly sum up, it is the story of a soldier, Inman, who deserts the Confederacy toward the end of the war. He is wounded in a hospital and basically just walks away with the intention of walking home to Cold Mountain (which I believe is actually in North Carolina). The author's note in the back indicates that he has used an ancestor's story as the basis for his tale, with much elaboration. At some point during his journey home, fraught with many starving, cold and scary nights, he latches on to the idea that he must find out if Ada Monroe loves him and will marry him. He feels like a less-than-human creature after all the killing and the death of war, and only her beauty and love can make him whole.

Ada, for her part, is home on Cold Mountain. While Inman is comfortable making his home in the woods during his journey back, Ada is a Charlotte girl brought to the backwoods of the mountain by her father, a preacher, just a few years ago. They lived as city folk still live, not tending their land or producing anything on their own. When her father passes away unexpectedly, leaving Ada alone with zero skills to survive (in the beginning she is literally eating biscuits for every meal because it's all she can make), she has to decide to buck up and make things work or quit and head back to her familiar city life. To her credit, she wants to make a home at Cold Mountain. Enter Ruby, a local who raised herself when her drunk and carousing father periodically abandoned her. She knows how to work the land and make the farm an efficient enterprise. Ada goes on to learn much about work, doing things for herself, and independence from this interesting character.

In the interim, there's all kinds of folks in the mix, one being Ruby's absent father. Finally, Inman and Ada do connect...and I won't ruin the ending for you, but it is slightly tragic. The book really started to pick up for me when Ada stopped acting like a ninny. It was nice to watch her progress into a true adult, after a lifetime of coddling from her father. Ruby's interactions are colorful and unique, so she is a character worth reading. Inman's self-realization of what he has done to other men, his humble thoughts on what he deserves in life and the ways in which he respects and loves the world slowly become apparent throughout the tale.

The style at first for me was a little slow to bear, but once I resigned myself to it, I enjoyed the way that the tale was told. I also really liked that it seemed similar to epic journeys of Odysseus, but in a more modern way. The book takes a different view of the civil war that one would not always first think of - that poor Southern farmers were shanghaied into service by wealthy landowners to protect their right to own slaves, with little positive outcome for the soldiers themselves. The disillusionment Inman and other outliers feel because of this is evident throughout the novel. Overall, I enjoyed it and have added to movie to my Netflix queue to judge its faithfulness to the novel.