It was in the month of June when Icame to read Charles Freizer's ' Cold Mountain". June is the foreplay of Monsoon's tryst with the Indian Subcontinent, August being its orgasm. We like to spend most of the time under blanket. Usually I choose fictions to read during the month as much as I like roasted cashew nut and a cup of black tea.
Coincidentally, the novel is all about the cosy laziness its characters desire to have during the peak of American Civil War. Laziness is a blessing when hyperactivity like war takes the toll of life in collectivity. In the novel the journey that the protagonist Inman undertakes by bunking compulsory military service, purportedly to meet his beloved Ada, takes him nearby the cold mountain, which symbolises yearning for laziness and collective living
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June is the month when lovers meet and exchange memories albeit in a short span of time. Inman meets Ada and hands her the tales of travails he has undergone on his way to meet her. They build a future in the way they build fire to keep off coldness. But no fire can keep off winter, which is the destiny pervading in the novel throughout. We see, towards the end of the novel, the hopes of a bright future, when there is no fear of war, smoulder beneath the cold mountain. Inman, who overcame all difficulties during the journey resembling that of an epic hero, is wounded fatally in a climatic fight. Our struggle, ideal as it is, will be ultimately overpowered by Destiny
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But can love be ever defeated? Inman dies not at the battlefield from where he escapes to a commune, but in the lap of Ada. She saw the wound beneath his neck, which reminds her of the sacrifice and recklessness that love brings about in human beings. It is this recklessness that gives Ada the the strength to exist in the loneliness.
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Cold Mountain is more a sonnet than a novel. Even descriptions of sexual activity is rendered poetically. I don't think the novel is historical fiction, as some critics have pointed out. It is an escape from history, which is bitterness in every sense of the term
Reviewed by
Coincidentally, the novel is all about the cosy laziness its characters desire to have during the peak of American Civil War. Laziness is a blessing when hyperactivity like war takes the toll of life in collectivity. In the novel the journey that the protagonist Inman undertakes by bunking compulsory military service, purportedly to meet his beloved Ada, takes him nearby the cold mountain, which symbolises yearning for laziness and collective living
*
June is the month when lovers meet and exchange memories albeit in a short span of time. Inman meets Ada and hands her the tales of travails he has undergone on his way to meet her. They build a future in the way they build fire to keep off coldness. But no fire can keep off winter, which is the destiny pervading in the novel throughout. We see, towards the end of the novel, the hopes of a bright future, when there is no fear of war, smoulder beneath the cold mountain. Inman, who overcame all difficulties during the journey resembling that of an epic hero, is wounded fatally in a climatic fight. Our struggle, ideal as it is, will be ultimately overpowered by Destiny
**
But can love be ever defeated? Inman dies not at the battlefield from where he escapes to a commune, but in the lap of Ada. She saw the wound beneath his neck, which reminds her of the sacrifice and recklessness that love brings about in human beings. It is this recklessness that gives Ada the the strength to exist in the loneliness.
***
Cold Mountain is more a sonnet than a novel. Even descriptions of sexual activity is rendered poetically. I don't think the novel is historical fiction, as some critics have pointed out. It is an escape from history, which is bitterness in every sense of the term
Reviewed by
Shameer KS
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