Thursday, October 12, 2006
A yokely-dokely pastiche.
Stephen Metcalf doesn't like the way Charles Frazier writes:
Oddly enough, Slate doesn't link to James Woods' 1997 trashing of Frazier's Cold Mountain, on grounds so evocative of what Metcalf writes now that I assumed he had written both reviews. Woods was so persuasive that I have never opened the copy of Cold Mountain that I had bought.
c
Sacred water, huckleberry juice, wolf teats—Thirteen Moons, you may have guessed, is a catalog of faux naive Americana. Much of the book is written in a "ye olde" diction: People go "a-roving," and get "a-plenty of oats," and "travel retrograde to [their] anger," whatever that means. It's a yokely-dokely pastiche, of Faulkner (by way of Toni Morrison) and of the King James Bible (by way of Jack Handy), and it is to the actual American idiom, past or present, roughly what the Rainforest Café is to the Amazon basin.Ouch.
Oddly enough, Slate doesn't link to James Woods' 1997 trashing of Frazier's Cold Mountain, on grounds so evocative of what Metcalf writes now that I assumed he had written both reviews. Woods was so persuasive that I have never opened the copy of Cold Mountain that I had bought.
c
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I really liked Cold Mountain quite a bit. The movie disappointed me considerably, since the book seemed to be more about the terrain that the main character was covering than the actual plot. Filming such a movie in the Czech Republic seemed to be missing the point entirely.
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