"Cold Mountain is a 1997 historical fiction novel by Charles Frazier. It tells the story of W. P. Inman, a wounded deserter from the Confederate army near the end of the American Civil War who walks for months to return to Ada Monroe, the love of his life; the plot shares several similarities with Homer's The Odyssey. The novel alternates chapter-by-chapter between Inman's and Ada's stories. It was Charles Frazier's first novel and a major bestseller, selling roughly three million copies worldwide. It was also adapted into an award-winning film of the same name."
Frazier's use of vivid diction is absolutely amazing. Superb to any other author:
"When he was squatted down loading, Inman could hear the firing, but also the slap of balls into meat"(11).
"Corpses on her doorstep. Others inside, dead in the attitude of crawling to shelter. The woman staring crazed past the threshold, past Inman's face, as if she saw nothing"(13).
"The clouds had broken open and revealed meteors flinging themselves out of an empty point of sky"(71).
"And then at some point the white man said a strange thing. He said that someday the world might be ordered so that when a man uses the term slave it be only metaphoric"(129).
"Blount had brought a pair of flutes and a partial bottle of champagne still cool enough to sweat in the heavy air"(141).
"Cold Mountain was a blue smear, a hump on the far ridgeline, made small by the long walk and no more dimensional against the sky than paper pasted on paper"(179).
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Everytime I come across any such descriptions, I become absolutely captivated. His mastery of language is to be of envy. I've read some great, great books, books that have taken me on journeys to places far, far away. To stranded islands, ancient Rome, Verona, the post-emancipated South, Paris, France, amid the fevers of the French Revolution, among others. But none have been so real, so romantic before. In a distance so short (in Virginia's Blue Ridge), so much magic can happen. And I think that's the true magic of reading. It's meant to take your breathe away.
