Close Reading from Charles Frazier

The following are a few excerpts from Charles Frazier's Thirteen Moons - excerpts that I NOTICED with the practice of 'Close Reading' that Francine Prose talks about in her book Reading for Writing.

p 97 - "Or maybe it is only that we are so habitually inattentive that when some rare but simple geometry grabs us by the shoulders and shakes us into consciousness, we call our response sacred."

p 143 - "We could not allow a wide space in the trail to pass without riding alongside each other and letting our hands touch. At such a moment of conclusion in later life, I would inevitably have felt a sense of failure, an overwhelming gloom in the knowledge that days such as those three were done and gone forever. But back then I simply exulted in the false but glorious knowledge that life would be exactly this way from now on. I wasn't different from anybody else. I took youth as a special pact from God."

p 313 - "Then another black woman younger and darker than the one who'd answered the door, came into the parlor carrying a wailing baby bundled in little white blankets. All you could see was a face like a barn owl's, just as round and flat and pale and fierce. Like all babies. If they had the physical means, they'd kill you without conscience to fulfill their slightest immediate desire. Same as housecats, which if they weighed two hundred pounds would not accede to our existence for a single day."

There are dozens - probably pages upon pages - of other wonderfully written passages in Frazier's second novel. These are just a few that grabbed me by the shoulders. In all, I found the story of Cold Mountain more moving than the story of Thirteen Moons, but I'd read anything Frazier ever writes again simply to wallow in his gift for language.