Varina
Charles Frazier, 2018
Ecco Books
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062405982
Summary
Sooner or later, history asks, which side were you on?
In his powerful new novel, Charles Frazier returns to the time and place of Cold Mountain, vividly bringing to life the chaos and devastation of the Civil War.
Her marriage prospects limited, teenage Varina Howell agrees to wed the much-older widower Jefferson Davis, with whom she expects the secure life of a Mississippi landowner.
Davis 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 book is a portrait of a woman who comes to realize that complicity carries consequences. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1950
• Where—Asheville, North Carolina, USA
• Education—B.A., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill;
M.A., Ph.D., Appalachian State University
• Awards—National Book Award for Fiction, 1997
• Currently—lives in Raleigh, North Carolina
Charles Frazier grew up in the mountains of North Carolina. Cold Mountain, his highly acclaimed first novel, was an international bestseller, and won the National Book Award in 1997. In 2006 Mr. Frazier published Thirteen Moons.
Frazier had been teaching University-level literature part-time when he first became spellbound by the story of his great-great uncle W. P. Inman. Inman was a confederate soldier during the Civil War who took a harrowing foot-journey from the ravaged battle fields back to his home in the mountains of North Carolina. The specifics of Inman's history were sketchy, indeed, but Frazier's father spun his tale with such enticing drama that Frazier began filling in the gaps, himself. Bits of the life of Frazier's grandfather, who also fought in the Civil War, helped flesh out the journey of William Pinkney Inman.
He also looked toward the legendary epic poem The Odyssey for inspiration. Slowly, a gripping tale of devotion, faith, redemption, and love coalesced in Frazier's mind. For six or seven years, he toiled away on the story that would ultimately become Cold Mountain, and with the novel's publication in 1997, the first-time author had a modern classic of American literature on his hands.
In Cold Mountain, Inman is a wounded confederate soldier who abandons the war to venture home to his beloved Ada. Along the way, he is confronted by various obstacles, but he journeys on valiantly, regardless. Frazier cleverly divides the narrative between Inman's trek and Ada's story as she struggles to make due in the wake of her father's death and the absence of her love.
When Frazier was only half finished with the book, he passed it along to friend and novelist Kaye Gibbons (Ellen Foster; A Virtuous Woman), who then got it into the hands of her agent. Much to his disbelief, Frazier's novel went on to become the smash sensation of the late-‘90s. Winning countless laudatory reviews from publications throughout the nation, Cold Mountain also became a must-read commercial smash. The novel ultimately won the coveted National Book Award for fiction and was adapted into an Oscar-winning motion picture starring Jude Law, Nicole Kidman and best supporting actress Renee Zellweger.
Nearly ten years after the publication of Cold Mountain, Frazier published Thirteen Moons. While Thirteen Moons returns to a 19th century setting, 12-year old Will is quite a different protagonist from Inman. With only a horse, a key, and a map, the boy is prodded into Indian country with the mission of running a trading post. In this dangerous environment, Will learns to empathize with the Cherokees, who open his mind to a much broader world than he had ever seen before.
In 2011 Frazier published Nightwoods, the story of a young woman living alone in the Appalachians who takes on the care of her murdered sisters young children, traumatized, violent and mute.
Extras
• Frazier grew up not far from the mountain he immortalized in Cold Mountain in the Blue Ridge of North Carolina. Although the actual Cold Mountain exists, the town after which it is named in the novel is entirely fictional.
• Reportedly, Frazier was offered a whopping $8 million advance for Thirteen Moons. Sadly, the book never reached the sales potential Random House had expected. (From Widkipedia.)
Book Reviews
[S]uperb.… Frazier’s historical research generally sits lightly on the story, almost always embedded gracefully in dialogue, a small telling incident or a sharp memory of kindness or brutality. His prose is both of the characters’ time and perfectly evocative.
Mary Dorie Russell - Washington Post
Varina portrays a prescient, conflicted heroine.… Slyly paced.… When [Frazier] is at full-throttle, incredible declarations are tossed off as mere jottings.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Frazier’s novel is the latest to star a worthy female figure rescued from history's dustbin. And Frazier is a superb prose stylist who elevates the historical fiction genre.… Sometimes Frazier’s considerable literary talents get in his way. His writing can be breathtaking, but Varina’s fragmented narrative hopscotches all over the place. Which is a shame, because this picaresque novel’s most memorable scenes rival Gone With the Wind (and Cold Mountain) for sheer jaw-dropping Dixie drama.
USA Today
Frazier works on an epic scale, but his genius is in the details—he has a scholar’s command of the physical realities of early America and a novelist’s gift for bringing them to life.
Time
Frazier’s interjection of historical detail is richly informative, and his descriptions of the natural world of the South are lyrical. While V’s emotional reserve and stoic narration keep her from becoming a fully vibrant character, this is a sharp, evocative novel.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.)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. —Vicki Gregory, Sch. of Information, Univ. of South Florida, Tampa
Library Journal
Intelligent, outspoken, and clear-sighted but yoked to an intransigent man, the real Varina… sometimes feels elusive.… [S]he proclaims "the right side won" yet seems unable to fully grasp slavery’s ramifications. [A]powerful realization of its time….
Booklist
The most contemporary touch is the disjointed timeline, but even that isn't entirely effective. The resulting text isn't so much a coherent narrative as a series of vignettes. Intriguing subject. Uneven execution.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for VARINA … then take off on your own:
1. How would you describe Varina Davis? Talk about her upbringing and consider the passage below: Does it ring true?
At sixteen—other than overwhelming scorn and rage—what power do you control? For the pimply boys V knew, it was guns and their prospects for inheritance. Girls had their bodies and minds. That age, you make choices and don’t always know you’re making them.
2. Comparisons have been made with Varina to Gone With the Wind, in terms of the stories themselves and especially the two heroines. Do you see similarities?
3. Consider this next passage regarding V's feelings toward slavery:
V has never made any claim of personal high ground. She grew up where and when she did. From earliest memory, owning other people was a given. But she began feeling the strangeness of it about nine or ten—not the wrongness or the sin of it, but the strangeness only.
In what way did slavery begin to feel strange to V?
4. Next, consider this passage:
[B]eing on the wrong side of history carries consequences. V lives that truth every day. If you’ve done terrible things, lived a terribly way, profited from pain in the face of history’s power to judge, then guilt and loss accrue.
In what way does V live the truth? And what is the "truth"—as she understands it? Has her understanding changed over the years?
5. How would you describe V's marriage with Jefferson Davis? Take into account the considerable age gap, as well as their differing personalities and beliefs.
6. In what way does Limber Jimmie/James Blake stand as a critique of V? How do their separate memories reveal their different experiences? What insights of America's greatest sin and greatest crisis do you, as a reader, gain from both characters' revelations?
7. V claims that "the right side won." Overall, how would you describe her attitude toward, and her understanding of, slavery? What do you think she would think about today's removal over the South's many civil war hero statues, including her husband's?
8. In her Washington Post review, Mary Doria Russell writes of Frazier's novel:
Elegiac without being exculpatory, it is an indictment of complicity without ignoring the historic complexity of the great evil at the core of American history.
Care to unpack that statement? What does Russell mean by"without ignoring the historical complexity"? What is complex about slavery: isn't it a case of black and white?
9. The book's timeline shifts frequently. Did you find this confusing or distracting? Or does the shifting perfectly reveal the fractured nature of memories, as well as the way the past bleeds continually into the present?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)