I’m going to be honest, Cold Mountain was a difficult read. It was slightly confusing because of the back and forth between flashbacks and present. Mainly I was just not interested in the book. I believe Charles Frazier is a good author, just not one that could capture or keep my interest. The story depressed me. I didn’t really have anything to look forward to except the idea that Inman and Ida might be together again. It seemed like a dark cloud hung over the story the whole time, and I find it hard to read a book like that. I get wrapped up in books, and I feel the emotions in the book. Cold Mountain made be feel sad and isolated in that sadness.
The title was perfect for the book in so many ways. Not just in setting but it also was perfect because of the dismal struggles that seem to pile up like a mountain. There were so many struggles for people to overcome. They never seemed to end, just one after another. I believe a lot of people can relate to the feeling of circumstances overwhelming them. I know I have for sure, it’s apart of being human. When authors write they want people to relate to the emotions in their story. This draws the reader in and makes them interested. We all just want to be understood on some level. I could relate to some of the themes in Cold Mountain and that is only reason I can write anything about it.
I can relate to the feeling I was mentioning earlier, about sometimes life presents one struggle after another. I’m not saying my life is a depressing story, far from it actually, but I know struggle and loss. I know what it is like to suffer physical loss, emotional loss, and experiencing the absence of someone you love. I have a lot of medical problems, and it seems like I collect more and more as the years go by. The book shows Inman in the hospital, wounded, helpless and lonely. I’ve been in a similar situation many times. I can relate to the feeling of just wanting to walk out. There is physically walking out then there is mentally walking out. Frazier wrote that Inman walked out, but I also think he just wanted to walk out of his mind. You can feel more trapped in your mind than you can in any place. Isolation traps you in your mind like no other. Ida feels extremely isolated in here circumstance. She moved to unfamiliar place, knowing only her father, then he passes away and she is left alone. Her love Inman is in the war, and she doesn’t know if he will come back to her. She feels that her heart is with him, and when you don’t even have your own heart, it gets pretty gloomy.
I understand the feeling of someone you love not be in your life. It is a terrible thing to do to yourself, to long for something you can’t have. We all can relate to this feeling. We have all wanted something or someone we couldn’t. The important thing about these feeling we have and the struggles we go through is how we deal with them. It seemed to me that Ida didn’t do very much about her situation, but there wasn’t much she could do. She worked with what life handed to her. What i did like was that she was honest about how she felt. I know a lot of people go into denial or mope to death, but she was like I feel this way and that is just how it is. Inman on the other hand felt the need to get away from his problems and understand them. He seemed more lost to me. There is different kinds of lonely. There is being in a familiar place with people, but in your head you alone. Then there is plain being by yourself. This book does a pretty good job showing this.
What I would really like for the author to have done was to show how Ida and Inman fell in love more. I think that would make us feel more of the tragedy of the separation. I wanted to feel closer the the characters.