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In his powerful fourth novel, Charles Frazier returns to the time and place of Cold Mountain , vividly bringing to life the chaos and devastation of the Civil War.
With her marriage prospects limited, teenage Varina Howell agrees to wed the much-older widower Jefferson Davis, with whom she expects a life of security as a Mississippi landowner. He instead pursues a career in politics and is eventually appointed president of the Confederacy, placing Varina at the white-hot center of one of the darkest moments in American history--culpable regardless of her intentions.
The Confederacy falling, her marriage in tatters, and the country divided, Varina and her children escape Richmond and travel south on their own, now fugitives with "bounties on their heads, an entire nation in pursuit."
Intimate in its detailed observations of one woman's tragic life and epic in its scope and power, Varina is a novel of an American war and its aftermath. Ultimately, the audiobook is a portrait of a woman who comes to realize that complicity carries consequences.
Critiques (3)
Critique du Guardian
The Cold Mountain author has returned to the civil war for this novel of flight and separation In February 1911, at a whites-only ceremony in New Orleans, the Jefferson Davis monument was erected to mark 50 years since the inauguration of the first and only man to hold the office of president of the Confederate States. Schoolchildren dressed in red, white and blue sang "Dixie" and were choreographed into a living Confederate flag. On 11 May 2017, under cover of darkness, the statue was taken down. If historical fiction seeks to to shed light on the present, now is the time for Charles Frazier to return to the civil war period that provided the background for his million-selling debut, Cold Mountain. As statues of Davis and other Confederate leaders come down across the south, Frazier has chosen to focus on the president's second wife, Varina Howell: bluestocking, opium addict, friend of Oscar Wilde and surely the most obscure woman to have borne the title first lady in America. The novel opens in 1906 in a fashionable upstate New York sanatorium where the 80-year-old Varina is attempting to detoxify from a lifetime of narcotics routinely prescribed to southern ladies "monthly and before important dances". She is visited by a black gentleman, James Blake, who identifies himself as a slave child the Davis family had adopted and is known, owing to his remarkable double-jointedness, as Jimmie Limber. At first, Varina refuses to acknowledge the sequence of events that caused her to flee with Jimmie and her four young children from the Confederate capital at Richmond, Virginia, when the city was besieged by northern forces in April 1865. But Varina's reluctance to discuss the past signifies the novel's clear engagement with the present. As she tells Jimmie: "If you haven't noticed, we're a furious nation, and war drums beat in our chest. Our leaders proclaim better than they negotiate. The only bright spot is, the right side won." As the intellectual daughter of an unsuccessful Mississippi businessman, Varina does not make for a spectacular catch: '"She had nothing but herself as a dowry. And that fundamental offering was not really in demand. Too tall, too dark, too slim, too educated, too opinionated." Her marriage to Davis, almost 20 years her senior, is presented as a pragmatic bid for economic security that was wholly devoid of romance (Davis was still in mourning for his first wife, Knoxie, the daughter of president Zachary Taylor). Even when installed in the presidential mansion - which Varina habitually refers to as "the Grey House" - she never escapes the insinuation that she is no more than a cuckoo in the Confederate nest: "Richmond presented a veneer of refinement over a deep core of brutality. And yet the women from the best families calling her too western, too frontier, too crude." Varina even likens herself to Euripides' version of Helen, musing that she played no part in the war, but that a phantom doppelgänger took her place Like Cold Mountain, Varina is a novel of flight and separation. Unlike the earlier work, it's a narrative in which neither main protagonist has any great desire to see the other again. Varina laments the fact that her husband's attempt to catch up with the family ultimately delivers them into federal hands: "I will always maintain that if he had left us on our own we would have made it to Havana - mainly because I wanted to escape and he didn't." The moment of capitulation to northern forces is pure farce, with Davis scampering towards a creek disguised as a washerwoman in his wife's bonnet and shawl. The Homeric parallels of Cold Mountain were frequently remarked upon, as the experience of the Confederate deserter Inman seemed to mirror the diversions and privations of Odysseus's long journey home. Such antique allusions are made explicit here: "Warred over landscapes lie burned and salted as throughly as Troy after the Greeks sailed home"; while the classically educated Varina even likens herself to Euripides' version of Helen, musing that she played no part in the war, but that an eidolon, or phantom doppelgänger, took her place. The rather grandiloquent assumption might be that if Cold Mountain was Frazier's Odyssey, Varina has been conceived as his Iliad. Yet there's a disorienting unevenness to the narrative tone, in which Varina's reminiscences, as told to Blake in the sanatorium, are interrupted by an omniscient voice in the present tense who refers to the protagonist as "V" when passing biographical judgment: "V has never made any claim of personal high ground. She grew up when and where she did. From earliest memory, owning people was a given." The non-chronological narrative becomes so complex that even Frazier seems to lose his place in it at times. The early pages establish an image of "North and South like grotesque reflections of one another in a carnival mirror". The metaphor feels less effective, recycled 200 pages later, when Varina moves into "a White House reflected in a grotesque carnival mirror". Above all, the novel inevitably lacks the big, box-of-tissues finale that provided Cold Mountain with its emotional heft, as few people are likely to be moved to weep for Varina or her cold-blooded, "raptor-like" husband. But perhaps this is not the time and place for romance. The significance of Frazier's novel has less to do with its potential as Hollywood fodder than its clear-sighted depiction of culpable leaders in a divided America. As Blake reflects after his final visit to the sanatorium: "He [Davis] did as most politicians do - except more so - corrupt our language and symbols of freedom, pervert our heroes. Because like so many of them, he held no beloved idea or philosophy as tightly as his money purse." - Alfred Hickling.
Critique du New York Review of Books
DANCING BEARS: True Stories of People Nostalgic for Life Under Tyranny, by Witold Szablowski. (Penguin, paper, $16.) This utterly original book by a Polish journalist describes how Bulgarians earned money by making captive bears dance, then shifts to a farreaching conversation about the meaning of freedom. BENEATH A RUTHLESS SUN: A True Story of Violence, Race, and Justice Lost and Found, by Gilbert King. (Riverhead, $28.) In his latest book, King returns to the corrupt Jim Crow-era Florida sheriff he wrote about in his 2013 Pulitzer Prize winner, "Devil in the Grove." Here, the victims of his brutality include a mentally disabled white teenager, falsely accused of rape. THE PARKING LOT ATTENDANT, by Nafkote Tamirat. (Holt, $26.) An Ethiopian-American teenager living in a mysterious island commune narrates this impressive debut novel, recalling her childhood in Boston and her entanglement there with a charismatic parking-lot attendant and his possibly sinister schemes. VARINA, by Charles Frazier. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $27.99.) Returning to the Southern landscapes of his best-selling novel, "Cold Mountain," Frazier uses his new novel to revive one of the almost forgotten figures of 19th-century American history, the much younger and much conflicted wife of Jefferson Davis. THE SPARSHOLT AFFAIR, by Alan Hollinghurst. (Knopf, $28.95.) For a man in the 1950s, gay sex was a scandal that led to a prison term. His son comes to maturity in a different era, one in which he can take a legal husband. Hollinghurst's novel traces the private and public twists of this process. SOMETHING WONDERFUL: Rodgers and Hammerstein's Broadway Revolution, by Todd S. Purdum. (Holt, $32.) Not long ago, these progenitors of virtually all modern musical theater were widely considered dull, stodgy middlebrows. A political writer by trade, Purdum demonstrates, through a dual portrait of the brilliant songwriters, just how wrongheaded that was. TWO SISTERS: A Father, His Daughters, and Their Journey Into the Syrian Jihad, by Asne Seierstad. Translated by Sean Kinsella. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28.) This absorbing account reconstructs the saga of Muslim sisters who fled their home in Norway to join ISIS, and of the distraught father who went after them. THE WOMAN'S HOUR: The Great Fight to Win the Vote, by Elaine Weiss. (Viking, $28.) After Congress passed the 19 th Amendment in 1919, ratification was required in 36 states, and all eyes were on Tennessee. Weiss's view of the proceedings is panoramic and juicy. UNCLE SHAWN AND BILL AND THE ALMOST ENTIRELY UNPLANNED ADVENTURE, by A. L. Kennedy. (Kane Miller, paper, $5.99; ages 7 to 10.) In this delightfully cracked first children's book from a well-regarded novelist, a man helps a badger flee danger. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
Critique du Library Journal
Frazier reprises his Cold Mountain success, this time focusing on a less familiar historical figure from the Civil War: Varina, wife of Confederate president Jefferson -Davis. Varina's unconventional opinions and attitudes, contemporaneously perceived as less than fully enthusiastic toward her husband's lost cause, probably accounts for this gap in popular knowledge. Frazier tells her story in the form of an imagined oral memoir, in which she recounts her story to a black man, "-Jimmie Limber," whom she rescued from the streets of Richmond, VA, when he was abandoned as a toddler. Focusing on events following Lee's surrender when she and her children fled the Confederate capital, and bouncing between pre- and postwar events, this narrative approach succeeds after a slow start. The unveiling of Varina's sad story piques the reader's curiosity. Much of what Frazier imagines is consistent with the incomplete historical record surrounding Varina, and he fills in the blanks to reveal a powerful personality that, while of her times, has much to say to us today in respect of how the impact of great events on individuals can affect the history of those events. VERDICT Highly recommended for general readers as well as anyone interested in American history. [See Prepub Alert, 10/5/17.]-Vicki Gregory, Sch. of Information, Univ. of South Florida, Tampa © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
