Redheaded Reviews: Varina by Charles Frazier

Varina, written by Charles Frazier, author of Cold Mountain, is about Varina Howell Davis, wife of Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederate States of America. It opens in 1906 with a middle-aged black man who has come to her to fill in parts of his past to her who is staying at a "health spa" likely for addiction to laudanum. It seems that when he was a child he stayed with her family as a freed person but also as a child that they were taking care of after finding him being beaten in the streets. Varina put him in with her children to be raised. When Sherman was making his way South burning everything in his path and Richmond became indefensible, Jeff sent her and the children south heading toward Florida and Havana. Varina tells this man, James "Jimmie Limber" Brooks his story and her own story of her life before meeting Jefferson and then their life together.

This book goes back and forth in time between the present, which is 1906 and 1865 and 1874 and 1842 onward. This leads to whiplash as you are thrown willy nilly through the history of this woman's life. In the beginning, she had it pretty hard in that she once came from a wealthy family, but her father squandered the money that he got from his father on bad deals. Pretty soon there was nothing left. She has no dowry to speak of and is now in a position to be asked to no parties to meet gentlemen when her father sends her to stay with a new family in the area the Davis's. While staying with Joe Davis and his many daughters who seem to be of a similar age and whose mother is not much older than Varina who is seventeen and these daughters are in their teens. No one is really sure what is going on in that house. But his brother is Jefferson Davis and he made a handshake deal with him for some land, Brierfield where he made a mess of building it. Jefferson hasn't felt like marrying anyone since his first wife died of malaria not long after they married. But when he meets Varina he sees someone he can marry, though he does not love her.

Varina agrees to marry him after much ado. She has dreams that come true and she dreams of the Civil War and of the South losing and of her and Jefferson being President and First Lady and it ending badly for them. She dreams of losing children she hasn't had yet. As a matter of fact, it would be years before they would have their first child mainly due to the fact that they weren't on equal footing in the marriage and Jefferson's heart and mind were elsewhere. He doesn't even leave her Briarfield in his will but leaves it to his brother to watch over her as he sees fit. Which she knows he'll kick her out as soon as possible. So she sets out war against brother Joe and Jeff to get her inheritance and refuses to sleep with Jefferson in case they have children from that union that would be in peril of losing their inheritance and being destitute. At this time Jefferson is working in Washington D.C. in the government and without Varina there to help him he is failing at his job. Then the Mexican-American War broke out and he left them to go off and fight in it.

The character of James Brooks is not fully formed and you don't feel as though you really know him at all. It's like he's a prop for Varina to tell her story to which could have just as easily have been done to a newspaper editor or someone with whom you wouldn't want to feel a connection to but don't. And the character of Laura who is staying at the place Varina is staying at in 1906 is superfluous. She has no purpose in the story and wastes time and space. Some of the histories behind Varina's story, if true, is entertaining. The story of her laudanum taking and how she is not a "professional" taker but an average person taking it every day and her reasoning behind it are interesting. This isn't a bad book, it just isn't a great book either. It's somewhere in between. I'm just not that fond of his writing style. I give it three and a half stars out of five stars.

Quotes

So, right now, I wish you every day a happy day and good appetite, warm feet, good friends & everything but forgetfulness. I do not think I would have longed for, or used the water of Lethe. Memory is truly psossession sometimes.

-Charles Frazier (Varina p 40)

Give a Yankee one little dried pea and three thimbles and he can buy groceries. Give him a boxful of cheap, shiny pocketknives and pistols to trade and he will turn it into a career. But give him a war, and he’ll make a fortune to last centuries. It’s not something they learn. They’re saturated in it from birth. End result—we lost everything and they create thousands of new millionaires.

-Charles Frazier (Varina p 43)

What those miserable political animals are doing to that beautiful man [Jefferson Davis]—a man, let me be clear, I have wanted to kill many time sfor my own reasons—is disgusting and heartbreaking.

-Charles Frazier (Varina p 227)

Never acknowledge that the general culture is often stupid or evil and would vote out God in favor of the devil if he fed them back their hate and fear in a way that made them feel righteous.

-Charles Fraizer (Varina p 328-9)

You’ll find that as you grow old, you stop bothering to hide the self you’ve been all along.

-Charles Frazier (Varina p 335)

-And his ideas on war were equally abstract, He said, War is an affair of lines—a problem of geometry.

-Except pencil marks drawn on paper with a straightedge and a protractor don’t bleed.

-Exactly, V said.

-Charles Frazier (Varina p 337)