Nine years in the making, this is the much anticipated follow-up to Frazier's debut novel "Cold Mountain".
From Amazon.Com and Publishers Weekly, here is a write up of the book:
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ā¦ a bountiful literary panorama again set primarily in North Carolinaās Great Smoky Mountains. The story takes place mostly before the Civil War this time, and it is epic in scope. With pristine prose thatās often wry, Frazier brings a rough-and-tumble pioneer past magnificently to life, indicts America with painful bluntness for the betrayal of its native people and recounts a romance rife with sadness. In a departure from āCold Mountaināsā Inman, Will Cooper narrates his own story in retrospect, beginning with his days as an orphaned, literate ābound boyā who is dispatched to run a musty trading post at the edge of the Cherokee Nation. Nearly nine mesmerizing decades later, Will is an eccentric elder of great accomplishments and gargantuan failures, perched cantankerously on his front porch taking potshots at passenger trains rumbling across his property (he owns āquite a fewā shares of the railroad). Over the years, Will - modeled very loosely, Frazier acknowledges, on real-life frontiersman William Holland Thomas - becomes a prosperous merchant, a self-taught lawyer and a state senator; heās adopted by a Cherokee elder and later leads the clan as a white Indian chief; he bears terrible witness to the 1838-1839 Trail of Tears; a quarter-century later, he goes to battle for the Confederacy as a self-anointed colonel, leading a mostly Indian force with a ālegion of lawyers and bookkeepers and shop clerksā as officers; as time passes, his life intersects with such figures as Davy Crockett, Sen. John C. Calhoun and President Andrew Jackson. After the Civil War, Will fritters away a fortune through wanderlust, neglect and unquenched longing for his one true love, Claire, a girl he won in a card game when they were both 12, wooed for two erotic summers in his teen years and found again several decades later. In the novelās wistful coda, recalling Claireās voice inflicts āflesh wounds of memory, painful but inconclusiveāĆ¢ā¬āa voice that an uncertain old Will hears in the static hiss when he answers his newfangled phone in the bookās opening pages.
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Itās funny how some people are reacting to this book. Unfortunately in the literary world, Frazier made a huge splash with āCold Mountainā. I enjoyed the book, too. But it seems that many havenāt been happy with Frazierās second offering. The shame of that is that āThirteen Moonsā in some respects is better. Frazier has given us a great first person perspective story that spans many years. He develops Willās character with such ease it seems, and keeps him consistent. So what is there not to like?
At times it is not exciting to read āThirteen Moonsā. We donāt have Inman running away from a war to get back to the only woman he realizes he loved. And we donāt have the decaying life of Ada, hoping to see her dear Inman again. We are not working to any great goal. All we have is Willās life. Little and big triumphs and failures, told by the man himself. Sure, it doesnāt move fast at times. And I didnāt find myself clamoring to read the book at times. However, this is a very good piece of literature. If the reader goes in looking for some grand love story, or a chase, then they will be disappointed. They need to sit back and take in Frazierās prose and development of a grand story.
There is much to enjoy about this book, which I found. And maybe it helped that I heard all the comments about how this book was much less in stature compared to his debut. But sometimes I just think people expect too much.
Thirteen Moons Reviews
"Thirteen Moons" by Charles Frazier
Posted : 16 years, 3 months ago on 21 February 2008 02:210 comments, Reply to this entry