Cold Mountain: A Novel

Maybe Not Easy To Read, But You Will Be Happy You Did

Inman is a Confederate soldier and he is not very happy about it. After a hospital stay for a wound, he decides to leave the military life and return home. Maybe he will reunite with Ada; he hopes so. He is, however, aware that his decision will be opposed by a few groups. The establishment military will try to capture him. Inman feared more the bands of common criminals operating under flags of pseudo-patriotism, like the Home Guard, that would like to capture him. Some would turn him over to the Confederate Army; some would turn him over to the federal Army. Some would kill him for fun. Inman sets off on a long foot journey; a horse would both require care and attract attention. The journey could take months. Each chapter is a story of a character that Inman meets along the way. Some characters reappear in later chapters, but each chapter could have been written as a short story. One entertaining part of the reading experience with this book was that I had to use a dictionary, frequently. This well researched book uses vocabulary of the time to describe things that are no longer in common use. I did not know what “mast” was (p 83). The phrase “where the horse was taken from between the thills and put in a stall” (p.201) stopped me. What are thills? Even the Kindle supplied dictionary was sometimes not helpful; either there was no definition or the definition given made no sense in context. Further research gave me the answer and I liked the challenge. There is an interesting style of writing with complex sentences that provoke several thoughts from just one sentence. “The man had a big round head which sat unbalanced on him like God was being witty about making the insides of it so small. Though he was nearly thirty according to Stobrod, people still called him a boy because his thoughts would not wrap around the least puzzle. To him, the world had no order of succession, no causation, no precedent. Everything he saw was new-minted, and thus every day was a par...