thirteen moons by Charles Frazier -- a wonderful literary discovery

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	• Thirteen Moons Charles Frazier Sceptre, 2006 - 432 pages average customer review:based on 173 reviews view larger image
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First book I've ever finished and immediately reread

Having once lived in those inpenetrable laurel and rhododendron forests, Frazier's writing always makes me wax nostalgic. He perfectly captures the sounds, smells and smoky vistas I remember. His prose is of the highest order. The book slowed a bit in the middle and the protagonist got a bit too self-absorbed. Still, I think that was the point of the narrative. While the protagonist, Cooper, was a highly intelligent man, he was also a womanizing bum. In our twilight years, missed opportunity seems to loom large in our ruminations. I can't speak for the author, but I think that was one of his main points. Books like this should be sipped like fine wine, or as Cooper would surely prefer, like an Islay single-malt. Peaty scotches aren't everyone's cup of tea and neither is Frazier's style. I find them equally intoxicating.

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An Immersive Historical Fiction

As in Cold Mountain, when Frazier lets you into the room of the past, he quietly closes the door behind you. You are there, you are immersed. And he lets you think you understand what is important about that which is unfolding before you - in Thirteen Moons, for example - it is the life story of the frontiersman Will Cooper, told in first person, from age 12 to 90, living through the entire 1800's within the Eastern Cherokee Indian Nation in North Carolina and making something of a success of it. This is a romance too of, yes again, passionate unrequited love, with the man being, again, left largely in the dark, but only a bit moreso than the woman. The quietly played-out background drama, the uprooting of the entire Cherokee Nation, leading to their Removal and the Trail of Tears, only slowly dawns on the reader. It is truly gentle way to experience history - through anecdotal daily life, experiencing the waves of change and the clear effects of the villains, e.g., Head of State Jackson and heroes, e.g., the philosophical Bear.

To me the weak point here is that we never really get to understand at all two of the main characters - Claire and Featherstone. The novel starts and ends with Claire, and yet her story is left as a mysterious as it began. OK, I can take it and work with this - but Frazier does such a good job with Will I wish he would have given us the full circle of the three lives.

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An educational experience

The author provides a brief note at the end of the book stating that the main character, Will, is not William Holland Thomas, "but that they share the same DNA". I'm not sure what that means exactly; I did a little homework and many of the exact same events of Thomas' life are portrayed in "Thirteen Moons" through Will. This fact is a solid response for those who claim the story is preposterous and beyond the scope of their personal imagination.

At any rate, I have not read Cold Mountain, so it did not effect how I read or thought about this book. Although I did not find the characters "unlikable" like so many other reviewers here, I did find them to be a bit hollow or undeveloped. It was hard for me to understand why Will had such intense passion and love for Claire or his love/hate relationship with Featherstone, but I used my imagination to fill in the gaps and simply read on.

Unlike some of the other reviewers, I did find the prose to be more lyrical than pretentious. Although too few, there were certain passages that I read over and over because I found them beautifully written and insightful. For instance, once Will has become the defacto chief of what is left of the Eastern Cherokee, he finds himself playing arbiter to petty squabbles between tribe members. In one case involving two "old grey-headed men fighting about something they could hardly remember", Will tells the old friends, "When people get to the age you are, anybody that shares even a few of your memories is a treasure beyond price. Love them and forgive their foolishness and hope they'll forgive yours."

The last fourth of the book felt rushed and incomplete. For a book that tells such an "epic" tale, 420 pages seemed not enough to get the job done. Is that the book publishing industry's fault for thinking readers can't handle anything over 500 pages any more? Perhaps, but what would "Lonesome Dove" have been like if cut in half?

Perhaps my biggest issue with this book might come across as trite or inconsequential, but it almost made me stop reading the book when Will's recollection of his duel with Featherstone is cloudy at best. Here is someone who makes clear at the outset of the book that he has kept detailed journals most of his entire life and is able to describe in great detail the weather and smell of air on a given summer day 70 years ago, yet cannot recount with any clarity one of the seminal events of his life. Huh?

All that said, there was enough to like for me to keep reading. The main reason why I would recommend this book to anyone is because it can teach us a thing or two about the Cherokee people and their removal. I have lived in the southern Appalachian region my whole life and have hiked and camped in many of the same woods and forests Frazier's Will describes, yet I have never been told the story of the Cherokee people. Of course, we can't rely on our failing public schools' so-called American History classes to tell us about the realities of America's own version of "ethnic cleansing" and genocide, so where else might we learn about it if not for people like Frazier and his book?

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thirteen moons by Charles Frazier -- a wonderful literary discovery

thirteen moons by CHARLES FRAZIER -- a wonderful literary discovery

Among many books I have recently read, this novel stands out in so many ways: it is a masterpiece of writing, it is a lighthouse illuminating a murky uncharted historic landscape of the nineteenth century's grab for new territories for settlement, it is a character study of actual people who were the product of those pioneering years, it is also a window into the Native American culture as represented by the Cherokee Nation and in particular by its Eastern Band. This, however, does not exhaust its manifold values. The story line centered around the narrator is simultaneously heroic and comical, as the hero in his earnestness bares himself to the bone not cringing from self-mockery nor attempting to hide behind elaborate excuses. Thanks to such treatment Will Cooper's character resonates with vitality, truth, and believability and whether young, middle-aged or old he never loses his humanity. The best feature of the book in my personal estimation is its rare two-fold point of view. The reader encounters two cultures, one in its expansion and the other waning, pitifully entangled in a process of change, maturation and perhaps at some point in the future assimilation.

At the outset of the novel Will a twelve-year-old youngster lost in the Appalachian wilderness is heroic, indeed. He reins in his fears and musters his intelligence to survive in cold and rain in forests without road or track or marked trail with a map in which the territory he has entered is colored white without any features and named Cherokee Territory. A horse, the boy's only companion and a life-long friend, at this point is a colt, which he calls Waverly a name reminiscent of Walter Scott and implying already at this point the magnitude of this young man's formal education. Why he is versatile with Virgil's Aeneid and other classical lore! Right at the outset he will have to prove himself in more than just surviving or what he has learned; he will have to prove that he is a man. Disregarding all dangers to his life he can prove that he can outplay the figures from the frontier at cards, that he can stand his liquor as a man, that he can win the heart of a girl and regain his coat - his only protection against winter and his beloved colt. This is just the beginning. A stretch of some eighty more years of this man's life among the Indian Nation as their adoptee, their interpreter, their representative and lawyer, their chief and colonel during the Civil War fighting under General Lee's banner will follow. Throughout the hundreds of episodes that follow, the reader gains an understanding of this long vanished time and of its idiosyncrasies of which some become as a deja vu and some are total discoveries. The Washington political scene, where young Cooper tries to negotiate Bear's and his own land possession as legitimate, which in turn will allow the band to stay in their homes instead of being resettled to the West, sounds familiar. The Indian characters such as Bear, Featherstone or Charley are original studies. They are far removed from any clichés; they are neither complete villains nor complete heroes. They are real people motivated by human needs and desires. Bear is the most heroic of them all -- a leader, a philosopher, the rescuer of an abandoned child, a successful bargainer with the Whites, and yet a slave holder and a man governed by the whims of a wife.

Thus, gradually the modern times of the turn to the 20's century enter the scene with their own well known gadgets. There is the phone, there is the train and the charring of the virgin scenery. A man need no longer travel on his horse and sleep by the stream watching the hundreds of lights in heaven. Now his habitat is reduced to his house and porch and a little bit more as far as his horse's resting place is. On the other hand, the train tracks run by the river and through the man's front yard, and farther, through the mountains-- a completely different physical world. Those who were born into it, are not aware of the loss to their life and to the environment. Those who were denizens of a different time, as Will was, can vent their futile anger by firing a shot at the train without causing harm to people or the train. No man, not even the Indian nor Will Cooper can reverse the time. The lesson of the survival is to adapt.

Afore said are just fractions of the treasure this book has accumulated. Its prose is enchanting. It rings with the music of the real language and its patterns by which a man can talk to himself. Because the most of the story reads like a reverie that resembles the stream of consciousness, it makes the characters palpable both from within and outside. And, although, the text is comprised of the naturally spoken language it is not impoverished. On the contrary, it is rich with chosen vocabulary, original wording, uniquely picturesque. This is of course the greatest value in a book-- the language being its essential tool. The other greatest asset is the theme and the original rendering of the Indian milieu, philosophy and characters. Our twenty-first century's view of Indian lore may not own up to the real value of it per se or for all of us. Without even realizing, most of our best qualities, such as the appreciation of animals and will to fight for their rights as well as to struggle to save the virgin nature may well be owed to Indian philosophy. thirteen moons should definitely be considered as one of the great additions to American literature.

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Thirteen Moons better than reviews

The early reviews knocking Thirteen Moons were off the mark. I think the reviewers did not understand the culture of the times and simply missed many of the subtle points Frazier makes. Sort of like a non-golfer reviewing a golf book and missing the point of "chunking a shot".

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