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01/26/2004 Archived Entry: "Cold Mountain"
Being a Jude Law fan since Gattacca (sp?), you know that I HAD to watch Cold Mountain. Jude Law, Nicole Kidman... an English guy and an Australlian playing Americans that live in the South during the Civil War. If you don't call that odd, I don't know what is. It's sort of like my friend who has an Japanese first name, a German last name and she was born on the fourth of July.
Anyway, since I am the kind of person that read the book first before I watch the movie, I decided to read Cold Mountain. After all, it definitely recieved a lot of praise, a lot of awards, a lot of people saying that it was one of the best war novels of all time and it's a great love story.
Well... my opinion? I HATE HATE HATE HATE THIS BOOK! It's awful. I was about 20 pages into the book and I already hated it. I don't understand how Frazier got awards for writing this crap of a book. I don't understand how people can AWARD such a book as this.
Maybe it was the writing I don't like for I think Frazier's writing sounds way too contrieved and TRYING TOO HARD. And then this story isn't at all a LOVE story as people say it is. The whole "Love" thing didn't even come to play until the very last chapters. I think the movie played up the love story a little more than the book ever did. Grant it, Inman like the movie escapes the war just to go back to Ada but their eventual "love" is basically like 30 pages long out of 400+ pages. This book is more war and rambling than anything else. The war stories would be about 100 pages. Actual interesting stuff would be around another hundred pages. So 230 pages of useful things in this book while the other 170+ pages are shit.
The only reason why this book wasn't a total waste of my time were the interesting characters that Inman met on his way home to Ada. There was that old woman with the goats, Veasey, the girl named Sara, and the guy from the south who was to inherit this big plantation but was willing to give it all up for a slave he fell in love with. There's also the character of Ruby that befriended Ada. THOSE were the only damn story lines that were interesting and I wished Cold Mountain was about those characters rather than the two characters I was supposed to care about. Most of the book Fraizer just desrcibes every stupid detail. I guess he just wants to prove to us all that he knows the Civil War. I mean he would describe gun handles, dresses, things in the woods, like tree sap for example. If he wrote more pages to this novel I wouldn't be surprised if he maticulously described nail fugus from a patriots corpse. I swear. I couldn't stand it anymore. It was just awful. Maybe he's acurate in his ways but it's an awful book.
And I've read war books before. I never minded to read war books. There was the Diary of Anne Frank, Night, Red Badge of Courage, Snow Falling on Cedars etc... I can go on (yes, these stories portray all different perspectives of war). cold Mountain tries too hard to be authentic. And for anyone looking for a love story in this crap needs to put the book back on the rack and read Snow Falling on Cedars instead or some other good worthy story.
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Look, even an amazon.com reader agreed with me. He/she took the words right out of my mouth
why is this book so boring? i don't need to know how wet and brown and chocolatey and soggy and damp and moist and dark and marshy the marsh was. i feel allowing room for the reader to infer a few details with their own imagination might have been nice. the national book award...really? i was afraid for inman to take his next step or wake from slumber in dread of being subjected to another 5 pages of how dirty and brown and chalky and dry the dirt beneath his black, heavy, worn, creased, leathery boots were. through frazier's superfluous descriptions i was waiting to read about how foul inman smelled, but no such luck. what did i learn from reading this book? quotation marks are our friends.
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And here's another
This book was so incredibly boring and long. It went on and on. I have no idea what fool would ever give this book an award! I think you deserve an award if you finish reading it. I can't believe they made a movie about this book. Honestly, this has got to be one of the all time worst books ever written.