Cold Mountain, by Charles Frazier
Trade paperback, probably the 1998 edition

Berkeley, CA
September 2002

Perhaps it is too soon to review this novel. What was important then is still important, and I have not had enough time to forget what will be ultimately unimportant.

Or, perhaps more accurately, I feel myself to still be a part of the book, to be like Inman: not a little sick, still distant, still tapping on the doors of impossibility in the afterwash of a dream.

I have never loved anything so far away before, OnTheOtherSideOfTheWorld. I have never been both so terribly afraid and so inexplicably certain. Three thousand militating causes can mitigate between now and June: most of all myself. I have not been damaged enough, I think. I am still capable of betrayal, and as it is unclear to me what constitutes it I am as it were always standing on the brink of it, always guilty of it, still pulled in a thousand directions.

I still talk in indirection; my voice still runs in circles. How can you betray her when she does not expect you to be faithful? my friends who know the whole story ask. I can’t, except by betraying myself. I can kill off that creature of glorious desire, of furious cigarettes, of motion and happy silence, who has found its nest in my body of all places.

You must preserve yourself, Spinoza says. If only it were clear what the self is. It is not anything as simple as life, and in fact you must be willing to lose your life rather than your self. And it is not clear to me whether this bird, who seems my soul at times and at others a restless, dirty, alien thing, can live in company with any other woman, and whether I would be better off with it dead or asleep.

(see 30September2002)