Varina

V was an extraordinary woman. She lived fully every day no matter what came her way. She made friends among every rung of society and protected those she loved. She survived more death than most humans can endure and still found delight in life.she did not believe in slavery, yet she stood behind the very man who led the fight to keep it.

The magnificent fluidity of writing captures a historical moment in civil wartime as seen and experienced by Varina, the lovely wife of Jefferson Davies.
Her lifelong journey of strength, compassion and love is manifest in this graceful story of her life.

Maybe not a Faulkner or Warren effort, but a very fine piece of writing; among the best civil war novels--without having to be one. Varina Davis is a vivid character; as is the occasional walkon, May Chestnut.

Charles Frazier has breathed life into Varina Davis. I knew nothing about the wife of Jefferson Davis before reading Frazier's book. She was a fascinating woman. Her life was full of drama and trauma. Scarlett O'Hara was fictional. Varina was real. This is a fictional work but so much was true. A good read.

The magnificent fluidity of writing captures a historical moment in civil wartime as seen and experienced by Varina, the lovely wife of Jefferson Davies.
Her lifelong journey of strength, compassion and love is manifest in this graceful story of her life.

Maybe not a Faulkner or Warren effort, but a very fine piece of writing; among the best civil war novels--without having to be one. Varina Davis is a vivid character; as is the occasional walkon, May Chestnut.

Charles Frazier has breathed life into Varina Davis. I knew nothing about the wife of Jefferson Davis before reading Frazier's book. She was a fascinating woman. Her life was full of drama and trauma. Scarlett O'Hara was fictional. Varina was real. This is a fictional work but so much was true. A good read.

a very vivid depiction of the hardships and injustices suffered by the people of the South in the Reconstruction era--a time of anarchy - and explains why Southerners to this day are resentful and distrustful of yankee--it takes many years, even generations, for those memories to fade and those wounds to heal.. Another well-writen story by Frazier.

This book did not live up to my expectations. Perhaps, Cold Mountain was just too good. Varina, wife of Jefferson Davis, is meeting with a young black man on Sundays, filling in his memories of the war. Being a child during the Civil War, his memory has holes in it. Varina and an entourage of displaced Southerners are on the run, homeless. She doesn't know what her future holds. Or what is the circumstance of her much older husband. This picture of the ending of the Civil War is Varina desperately trying to get to Florida and then on to Havana for her safety. This was not a page turner; it never got me involved.

Generally speaking I hate reviews that are in the first person. This one’s no exception, but, I feel the need because my personal interests are relevant: I have been researching Varina Davis for many years for a project. I’ve read every book about her and by her, I’ve read her letters, her surviving newspaper columns (if I were still in academia I’d collect them- they need to be), her husband’s writings, all of the major biographies of her husband and quite a few lesser ones, books by and about her daughter, etc.. She’s been so much a part of my life that as I’m writing this there’s a framed print of the drawing she did of Oscar Wilde on my wall. (As a lifelong southerner I often feel the need to tell people I’m researching Mrs. Jefferson Davis “No no no… really, it’s not veneration of the Confederacy- she was about the last person you’d expect to be Mrs. Jefferson Davis…”.)
When I learned that Charles Frazier was writing a novel based on her I had that panic when you hear that your favorite little out-of-the-way spot in the woods has just been recommended on the most widely read travel site on the Internet: glad somebody else loves it, terrified it that it’s going to go completely commercial and not be the same anymore. I bought the book on audio and in hardcopy the day it was released, read it all the way through, listened to it all the way through, and made lots of notes. I did not want to post my review immediately because I felt it would be unfair, and also because I hate “here’s what I would have done different” reviews even more than book reviews written in the first person. Enough time has passed that I’m not as tempted to do the latter.
So, while I’ll try to be concise, I’m writing the review just of the novel itself. Afterwards I’ll make comments about particular a few of the characterizations and historical events depicted that I think are relevant.
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Generally I liked it, very much, and would have more if I had been reading with a completely unbiased mind. I thought Frazier captured the complexity of the character and of 19th southern women in general. Presentism is the single greatest sin in historical fiction (i.e. characters and dialogue with 21st century mindset and morality in a time and place where NOBODY had that- only time travelers would see the world as we today see it) and Frazier did an outstanding job of avoiding this. One of my favorite moments was when Varina was reliving her courtship with Jefferson and it was very clear to herself and to the reader that his money (encumbered as it was by his brother) was very much a factor in her attraction, and that first one chose a beneficial mate and THEN worked on romance. Also when he dealt with how women of the 19th century had to deal with tragedies that would devastate people today who have the luxury of grieving (I’m speaking of the deaths of children in particular but there were such constant others) yet at the same time had to go on with their lives immediately, I felt “this is a man who understands the times about which he is writing”.
My favorite parts of the novel were all set during the voyage through hell as she and her party made their way through the almost post-apocalyptic South. Frazier really conveyed the impoverished terror of that landscape- it’s amazing she made it as far south into Georgia as she did without being robbed or worse. (The “suicide pistol” is completely true, including Jefferson’s instructions to use it on herself to preserve her honor.) While the journey is fictionalized- the events in the burned out mansion and the hog farm are mostly if not entirely Frazier’s inventions- they worked perfectly to illustrate the very real landscape through which she was traveling. Also, I applaud his depiction of Jefferson’s capture: apologists often write as if the “while wearing a dress” myth was completely baseless (he was not wearing a dress, but he WAS disguised with a woman’s wrap and his wife DID identify him as her mother), and Frazier also shares my own view that Davis deliberately attempted the May 1865 equivalent of “suicide by cop” when captured: I genuinely believe he wanted to go down in a hail of bullets (and, when reviewing the remaining two dozen years of his life, I would not altogether blame him).
The parts with Old Varina were also well done. The saddest thing about the novel is that her reunion with Jim Limber never happened, though I think that if it had it would likely have been much like that. Again with realism, Frazier has the adult Jim remembering things the way a middle aged man likely would remember an emotionally intense year with a foster family and the odyssey through the pine inferno that makes Scarlett’s fictional return to Tara look like an Uber ride at rush hour: images here and there, feelings, an occasional line of dialogue, but not linear and detailed occurrences. His affection for V is based more in 1906 than in 1864-1865 as he realizes in the present what she was like in his past, and again, Frazier does not give her a 21st century woman’s freedom of racism where the child she has taken into her home is concerned. (The story of Jim Limber has been, in my opinion, much romanticized where Jefferson Davis is concerned, but I think the real V was as devastated by his removal as Davis, a self-consumed man to begin with, like was not.)
The faults I found with the novel (other than the ones I have from having spent years researching several of its characters) are mainly sins of omission. I would like to have seen him examine Varina’s relationships with her daughter Winnie more- her greatest devastation was Winnie’s death and it says much about her strength and toughness that she survived that. I would love to have read more about her time in England and Europe- such an odd time because she was simultaneously in genteel poverty and without status and yet in shabby rooms in a strange land with no money she was as close to happy as she would come between her years as a D.C. hostess and her dowager years in New York, about which: I would also like to have dwelt more on her decision to leave Mississippi for Gotham and her years where she was simultaneously the priestess of her husband’s cult (once it was revived after years in which many ex-Confederates hated him as much as northerners) and, like Procopius with the Byzantine court, also the keeper of a secret history, her letters revealing that she saw him completely clearly in retrospect even as she wrote lovingly and nostalgically of her times with him for public consumption.
A nitpick would be when the teenaged cadets are relaying their memories of the Fall of Richmond. While this adds much to the reader who is learning, along with Varina, about the last days of the city and nation her husband fathered, the language was unrealistically detailed and flowery to be the fireside recollections of a traumatized teenager (recalling the fiery undersides of clouds and what not). On the other hand, you get to learn about the always fascinating and amazingly overlooked in southern folklore Judah Benjamin and his escape, so, there’s that. (Skipping ahead briefly to the comments: Benjamin played a MAJOR role in Varina’s life in Europe.)
All things considered, I happily recommend this as one of the best Civil War themed novels I have read in years. It is not one for readers who are looking for a great romance like Cold Mountain or for great battle scenes like the best of the Shaara novels, but whether reminding you how that travel and travail have the same route as you go with Varina on a horrible first class excursion to D.C. for her first tenure there or in the believable tender exchanges of an 80 year old white woman and a 46 year black widower who has a connection to her even if he cannot define it, it is an emotionally true novel and depicts the wartorn landscape of 1865 better than most histories. Thank you, Mr. Frazier.

Photos: the drawing made of Oscar Wilde by Varina Davis at Beauvoir, June 27, 1882.
Also, the volume of his poems he signed to her on the same day.

Twenty years after COLD MOUNTAIN, which won the National Book Award, became an international bestseller and adapted into an Academy Award-winning film, Charles Frazier revisits the days of the Civil War era in his latest novel, VARINA. This time the focus is on Varina Davis, the wife of Confederate president Jefferson Davis, unknowingly being placed on the wrong side of history.

Frazier takes readers through different points in Varina’s life as a mirror to life in the South, starting when she is an old woman in 1906 and meeting James Blake, an African-American schoolteacher seeking her out in hopes that she might be able to shed light on his childhood.

At 18, Varina Howell marries the much older widower Jefferson Davis, a Mississippi landowner with whom she expects a lifetime of security. Instead, after fighting the Mexican-American War, he begins a career in politics and eventually ends up as the president of the Confederacy in 1861. With this, Varina is placed at the center of events during the rise and fall of the Confederacy. As Union forces close in on Richmond, and with her marriage in tatters, Varina and her children --- including Limber Jimmy, a mixed-race boy she adopts --- flee south as fugitives with “bounties on their heads, an entire nation in pursuit,” hoping to find safe harbor in Cuba.

There is no doubt that Frazier’s lyricism is one of the highlights of the novel. However, to the average 21st-century reader, it can come off as verbose but inevitable in trying to imitate 19th-century speech. Even so, the historical research he does blends itself wonderfully into the dialogue.

Varina herself is written as someone who persists and eventually escapes the restrictions of the Confederacy, Southern culture and the expectations of women. Still, she can’t help but look back on her life that has been shaped by bad ideology. James acts as a convincing critic, keeping Varina’s unchecked comments about other people’s reality in balance, even those involving Jefferson himself:

“He did as most politicians do --- except more so --- corrupt our language and symbols of freedom, pervert our heroes. Put a heavy sack of gold in the hand of a man, and a feather-like declaration about freedom in the other. And then an outlaw sticks a pistol in his face and says give me one or the other. Every time --- ten out of ten --- he’ll hug the sack and throw away the ideals. Because the sack’s what’s behind the ideals.”

Outside of this, Varina and James are traversing different time periods, driven to figure out their existences in a radically changed world in the form of shared memories.

Some would say that going back to write about the same setting can be repetitive, but it is up to the right author to place upon it a new angle for looking at a challenging time period. Frazier succeeds in asking the questions pervading the novel --- “How do you escape a situation you’ve been wedded to?” and “How do you deal with the aftermath of a life-changing mistake?” --- without providing an easy answer that the wrong person could easily conjure. For those who are even mildly interested in learning about the Civil War, VARINA will be a fascinating read.

Reviewed by Gabriella Mayer

I've struggled over whether to give this book four or five stars. On the one hand, it's surely the best work of fiction that I've read this year (though it's been a weak year thus far for fiction, IMHO). And it's a wonderfully evocative portrait of a fascinating woman during a fascinating (if upsetting) period in our history; Frazier definitely does have a way of writing about the South, and it's on full display here.

On the other hand, as some other reviewers have pointed out, the portrait of Varina Davis (as in Mrs. Jefferson Davis), her relationships (particularly the relationship to her husband), and other aspects of the book are fuzzy. Maybe that's the price one pays for "evocative", but maybe not. And Frazier overuses metaphors; there were truly times during the book when I found myself thinking "enough!".

So, on balance, I'm giving "Varina" a four- rather than a five-star rating. However, it is a "high" four. It really is a beautifully crafted book that deserves to be read, savored, and taken seriously.

I rarely write reviews but I returned this to the library after only reading 25 pages. The substitution of "V" for the MAIN character's name was off-putting. However that was not enough to return it. I couldn't tolerate Frazier's aversion to quotation marks. It was very difficult to follow dialogues. Quotation marks send an unconscious signal to your brain that someone is talking and you know who is saying what. I had to re-read passages just to follow who was speaking and a hyphen isn't an indicator.

During the census of 1900 Varina Howell Davis declared her occupation as Writer/Landlord. Her husband Jefferson Davis, the first and only president of the Confederacy, countered with the cryptic label “Keeps house.” This contrast may have precipitated the author/narrator to speculate “the ebb and flow of power changes constantly.” At least it underscored the chasm of opinion in their marriage.

If such contradiction could sum up the paradox of their marriage, that would do it, except that their union was much more complex, a truth author Charles Frazier illustrates in his novel, a work of historical fiction entitled Varina. The first lady’s life was characterized by other contradictions: She fostered a mixed-race orphan she saw being beaten on the street and later when she moved to New York City, became friends with Julia, wife of the Ulysses S. Grant.

In Varina, Frazier paints the landscape of the chaotic world of the American Civil War / pre-Reconstruction days. Slaves had been freed, and surviving landowners of Southern society walked away from the wreckage, dazed and desolate. Varina, having survived miscarriages, the death of children, and the carnage of war, searched for dignity and meaning in a chaotic world that remained. Often she found herself living apart from her husband both domestically and abroad in London. At times the separation was invigorating: “When geography separated them, their letters became sweet.” Sometimes Jeff, her nickname for a much-older husband, pressed flowers from special places. After Jefferson died, Varina completed his memoir based on piles of his old notes, speeches, congressional records, and, of course, her memory. She was, of course, a writer at heart; she never just kept house.

James Brooks, the orphan she fostered, brackets the book with speculations about Varina’s life and his place in it, posing the question, “Was she a mother or an owner?” He follows up with the broader question implied, “What is her place in history?” Thus, he writes into his notebook these jottings: “Her last years, she was in many ways a very modern women—unanchored and unmoored, unconstrained by family, poverty, friends, or love of place. Making a major portion of her living from her own work and talent . . . Yearning for a reconciliation with the past—the country’s and her own. Her need to shape memory into history.”

The best selling author of Cold Mountain, Frazier demonstrates once again that his genius is in the details, ones he has extrapolated from published biographies and private letters of a couple which American history has largely overlooked.

Varina Howell Davis, the wife of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, is the subject of the latest book by Charles Frazier, author of Cold Mountain. It is presented as a series of memories as Varina recounts parts of her life to James Blake who was once Jimmy Limber, a black child she took care of during the last part of the Civil War. Now he's a schoolteacher who wants to know about the childhood he can only remember in flashes.
Cold Mountain is a favorite book, and the writing in Varina is as beautiful and evocative. Mr. Frazier has a gift for choosing the perfect word or phrase, and it is on full display here. I loved the writing and often paused over a sentence or paragraph to savor its meaning.
However, I never got a good feel for Varina which is too bad as she is the main character. Jimmy is more the catalyst who interviews her, trying to draw her out. I'm not sure he ever succeeds as V as she is known in the narrative is a wraith floating on a sea of bland memories buoyed only by the opium she ingests in varying degrees from the time she's thirteen. I never got a real feel for her; even her losses, the deaths of her young children, seemed distant and removed in the narrative. She knows many people but never seems truly attached to anyone, not her older husband or her children. V lived through many historical events from the Mexican-American war to the time of the Spanish-American war, but they are barely touched on in some ways, just part of her misty memories.
So, I was disappointed ultimately. I'll give this book 3 and 1/2 stars because it's so beautifully written, but I wish the author had delved deeper into the real woman, even if it was a fictional presentation.

Hollywood was able to turn "Cold Mountain" into a decent enough film, but "Varina", which I enjoyed tremendously, is another matter. While Frazier is almost cinematic in his evocative grasp of time and place, it is the beauty of his words and the almost dream-like narrative that begs "Varina" to be read—and savored. I realize the story is "historical fiction"—real characters, actual events, but who knows what they were thinking? There is no indication Jim Limber and Varina Davis ever met after the Civil War. But if they had, this might have happened. As far as the non-linear approach, I went with it, willingly. Life is so often reflection rather than action. It was no stretch at all to have dialogue without pesky punctuation. As a reader, let yourself enjoy this thoroughly unsentimental panorama of time and place. It rang true to me.

I was disappointed by this novel. I found it very hard to "get into." The flow was so disjointed that I was never quite sure where I was. While Mr. Frazier is the master of description and detail, the story line on this one was not his best. While described as a novel, I would have enjoyed a little more historical direction -- what was accurate; how much was imagined. I did not feel that I got to know Varina - her character; her personality; and her legacy. If you are seeking a historically based civil war novel, I would search a bit further.

Wow, just reading a Charles Frazier novel with his remarkable writing style on display is worth the price of admission, so to speak! The bestselling author of Cold Mountain upstages his previous novel with this serpentine historical fiction account of the life and times of Varina Howell (identified simply as “V” in the novel), wife of the eventual Confederate President Jefferson Davis during the Civil War. And I thought descriptive writing went away in the mid 1920s with Hemingway and his American expatriates in Paris, France (see my 2/17/2017 review of Lesley M.M. Blume’s Everybody Behaves Badly). Before I delve into the story, let me recount a paragraph of the novel, so you can see why I’m so excited by the author’s descriptive writing (which everybody knows is my favorite style). V arrives in 1874 London and observes her furnished rented flat: “The short stack of china stood only five dinner plates tall, each one chipped at the edges and crazed on the pink floral faces. Three soup bowls, five teacups, but only two saucers. Glassware - just four stems - cloudy as an old man’s eye. Bed and table linens and towels worn by time to an indeterminate color, like a teaspoon of coal dust in a pint of heavy cream - the color of dirty soles and also the color of the plaster walls. The tiny fireplace might have been adequate for roasting a single sparrow over a fistful of twigs. V pulled open a cupboard drawer and found a sprinkling of mouse droppings. The oblong black nubs moved like suddenly magnetized iron fillings or swirled tea leaves until they settled and found their pattern on the drawer bottom.” Is that classic writing, or what? By the way, Mr. Frazier must be a fan of Cormac McCarthy because he also doesn’t use quotation marks, when a Frazier character talks, it’s usually preceded by a dash (-).

The story meanders through the different years of V’s life, from chapter to chapter. While this type of writing is sometimes distracting to the reader, in this case it’s not. The modus operandi chapter seems to be when V lives in Saratoga Springs, NY. It is 1906 and V is now 80 years old and living in a NY resort hotel, The Retreat, when a mulatto gentleman, carrying a blue book written by a Miss Botume, approaches the hotel desk and asks for Mrs. Davis. He believes that he is the boy, Jimmie, in the blue book written by Miss Botume. As Jimmie (James Blake) waits by the hotel’s fireplace to see if Mrs. Davis will receive him...suddenly he sees, “An elderly woman enter the great room from one of the corridors. She resembles later photographs of Queen Victoria - much taller, but with similar gravity and tiredness dragging from behind. Same hairstyle. Her dress a sheen of eggplant. She walks by the piano player and palms the small of her back to correct her posture.” I love this author’s writing! V says that she doesn’t recollect him or his name, James Blake. James says to V, “Yes, Ma’am. Thank you for seeing me. I’ll be brief. What I wanted to speak to you about concerns the war.” V is angry, tired of answering questions about the war and her husband, Confederate President Jefferson Davis. She turns to leave. James says, “My apologies, Mrs. Davis. I saw in the Albany paper that you were here, and I wanted to see you and ask about this book and about the children. I don’t recall all the names, but I remember Joe.” V says, “What could you possibly know about Joe?” V’s young son, Joe, fell off a building and died...Jimmie was there. V is stunned that he knew about Joe’s death. She asks James if he can bend his wrists all the way to his forearm. He does it. V, remembering that James was double jointed, says, “You’re Jimmie Limber (her made up name for him when he was a child in her care in Richmond, VA).” V says, “I don’t need a book to know you, I’ve believed for years that all my boys were long gone, crossed over. I’ve thought of it as my diminishing circle of boys pinching to a black point, like the period at the end of a sentence. But here you are. Sit down and I’ll tell you what I remember.” Gadzooks, all this and I’m only on page nine.

On page eleven, V strives to refresh Jimmie’s mind as to what happened in Richmond at the end of the Civil War in 1865. So you get the benefit of reading more of Charles Frazier’s excellent composition: “Things fell apart slowly before they fell apart fast. Late March - Friday night before Richmond burned - V fled the false White House and the capital city. That afternoon she and Ellen Barnes packed in a rush, knowing they might never be back. Billy and Jimmie went back and forth from V to Ellen, touching their arms or hips for reassurance. Ellen always kept her hair parted in the middle and oiled, pulled back tight against her scalp. But that day, long curling strands escaped, and she kept sweeping them back from her face...when the packing was done, Jeff (the president) took V aside and gave her a departure present. A purse pistol, slight and pretty, almost an art object suited for display in a museum.” “He said that if the country fell (the South), she should take the children to Florida and find passage to Havana. Then he told V to keep the little pistol with her at all times, and if Federals tried to violate her, she should shoot herself. Or if she couldn’t do that, at least fire it in their direction to make them kill her.” I know this book is historical fiction, but the author had me believing that every word was fact, not fiction. Incidentally, most of the characters in this novel were real people, including Jimmie Limber. I have left almost all of the characters and situations out of my review and instead decided to focus on the author’s superb writing. That’s great for you because you now have the whole story waiting for you to discover. In the next paragraph, I’ll give you one more example of the writer’s talent...then I’m outta here!

We’re back to 1906 Saratoga Springs, NY, near the end of V’s life. She’s having lunch with her young friend Laura Scott, an actress, who is accompanied by her mother and brother. Read how Charles Frazier describes how Mrs. Scott eats, or more appropriately chomps (haha): “Lunch arrives. Mrs. Scott talks while she eats, and the cavity of her mouth as she works her food makes sounds like a rubber plunger opening a sink drain. Chicken salad and lettuce at various stages of liquidation make repeat appearances between lips and teeth. She holds her fork as if her finger joints hardly articulate, a limp reluctance, as if other people’s hands usually do that job for her. She talks without letup, complaining of Laura’s expenses.” To me, this novel was a work of art.

Varina is the young wife of the widowed Jefferson Davis, who later becomes president of the Confederacy. Davis is still in love with his dead wife, whom he idealizes, and is away from home often due to his political career. As Davis becomes deeply involved in national politics, Varina enjoys her life as a society hostess among the powerful of the day. She's a flawed, fascinating character who survived the cataclysm of the Civil War (with help from the Confederate treasury and recreational laudanum) and now is settled into genteel old age. As she reflects back on her life, she's not above shading her past to appear more noble and heroic than the historical record supports.

*Varina* is a "literary" fiction, in the sense that it will mainly appeal to people who like Henry James, Faulkner, O'Connor, R.P. Warren, and so on. ....Just a head's up...This is not a page-turner....But if you like lingering over a page, this is your book...The man writes prose better than anyone around these days...If you think you don't like "literature" this incredible novel may change your mind...Pure poetry...

I rarely write reviews but I returned this to the library after only reading 25 pages. The substitution of "V" for the MAIN character's name was off-putting. However that was not enough to return it. I couldn't tolerate Frazier's aversion to quotation marks. It was very difficult to follow dialogues. Quotation marks send an unconscious signal to your brain that someone is talking and you know who is saying what. I had to re-read passages just to follow who was speaking and a hyphen isn't an indicator.

During the census of 1900 Varina Howell Davis declared her occupation as Writer/Landlord. Her husband Jefferson Davis, the first and only president of the Confederacy, countered with the cryptic label “Keeps house.” This contrast may have precipitated the author/narrator to speculate “the ebb and flow of power changes constantly.” At least it underscored the chasm of opinion in their marriage.

If such contradiction could sum up the paradox of their marriage, that would do it, except that their union was much more complex, a truth author Charles Frazier illustrates in his novel, a work of historical fiction entitled Varina. The first lady’s life was characterized by other contradictions: She fostered a mixed-race orphan she saw being beaten on the street and later when she moved to New York City, became friends with Julia, wife of the Ulysses S. Grant.

In Varina, Frazier paints the landscape of the chaotic world of the American Civil War / pre-Reconstruction days. Slaves had been freed, and surviving landowners of Southern society walked away from the wreckage, dazed and desolate. Varina, having survived miscarriages, the death of children, and the carnage of war, searched for dignity and meaning in a chaotic world that remained. Often she found herself living apart from her husband both domestically and abroad in London. At times the separation was invigorating: “When geography separated them, their letters became sweet.” Sometimes Jeff, her nickname for a much-older husband, pressed flowers from special places. After Jefferson died, Varina completed his memoir based on piles of his old notes, speeches, congressional records, and, of course, her memory. She was, of course, a writer at heart; she never just kept house.

James Brooks, the orphan she fostered, brackets the book with speculations about Varina’s life and his place in it, posing the question, “Was she a mother or an owner?” He follows up with the broader question implied, “What is her place in history?” Thus, he writes into his notebook these jottings: “Her last years, she was in many ways a very modern women—unanchored and unmoored, unconstrained by family, poverty, friends, or love of place. Making a major portion of her living from her own work and talent . . . Yearning for a reconciliation with the past—the country’s and her own. Her need to shape memory into history.”

The best selling author of Cold Mountain, Frazier demonstrates once again that his genius is in the details, ones he has extrapolated from published biographies and private letters of a couple which American history has largely overlooked.

Varina Howell Davis, the wife of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, is the subject of the latest book by Charles Frazier, author of Cold Mountain. It is presented as a series of memories as Varina recounts parts of her life to James Blake who was once Jimmy Limber, a black child she took care of during the last part of the Civil War. Now he's a schoolteacher who wants to know about the childhood he can only remember in flashes.
Cold Mountain is a favorite book, and the writing in Varina is as beautiful and evocative. Mr. Frazier has a gift for choosing the perfect word or phrase, and it is on full display here. I loved the writing and often paused over a sentence or paragraph to savor its meaning.
However, I never got a good feel for Varina which is too bad as she is the main character. Jimmy is more the catalyst who interviews her, trying to draw her out. I'm not sure he ever succeeds as V as she is known in the narrative is a wraith floating on a sea of bland memories buoyed only by the opium she ingests in varying degrees from the time she's thirteen. I never got a real feel for her; even her losses, the deaths of her young children, seemed distant and removed in the narrative. She knows many people but never seems truly attached to anyone, not her older husband or her children. V lived through many historical events from the Mexican-American war to the time of the Spanish-American war, but they are barely touched on in some ways, just part of her misty memories.
So, I was disappointed ultimately. I'll give this book 3 and 1/2 stars because it's so beautifully written, but I wish the author had delved deeper into the real woman, even if it was a fictional presentation.

Hollywood was able to turn "Cold Mountain" into a decent enough film, but "Varina", which I enjoyed tremendously, is another matter. While Frazier is almost cinematic in his evocative grasp of time and place, it is the beauty of his words and the almost dream-like narrative that begs "Varina" to be read—and savored. I realize the story is "historical fiction"—real characters, actual events, but who knows what they were thinking? There is no indication Jim Limber and Varina Davis ever met after the Civil War. But if they had, this might have happened. As far as the non-linear approach, I went with it, willingly. Life is so often reflection rather than action. It was no stretch at all to have dialogue without pesky punctuation. As a reader, let yourself enjoy this thoroughly unsentimental panorama of time and place. It rang true to me.

I was disappointed by this novel. I found it very hard to "get into." The flow was so disjointed that I was never quite sure where I was. While Mr. Frazier is the master of description and detail, the story line on this one was not his best. While described as a novel, I would have enjoyed a little more historical direction -- what was accurate; how much was imagined. I did not feel that I got to know Varina - her character; her personality; and her legacy. If you are seeking a historically based civil war novel, I would search a bit further.

Wow, just reading a Charles Frazier novel with his remarkable writing style on display is worth the price of admission, so to speak! The bestselling author of Cold Mountain upstages his previous novel with this serpentine historical fiction account of the life and times of Varina Howell (identified simply as “V” in the novel), wife of the eventual Confederate President Jefferson Davis during the Civil War. And I thought descriptive writing went away in the mid 1920s with Hemingway and his American expatriates in Paris, France (see my 2/17/2017 review of Lesley M.M. Blume’s Everybody Behaves Badly). Before I delve into the story, let me recount a paragraph of the novel, so you can see why I’m so excited by the author’s descriptive writing (which everybody knows is my favorite style). V arrives in 1874 London and observes her furnished rented flat: “The short stack of china stood only five dinner plates tall, each one chipped at the edges and crazed on the pink floral faces. Three soup bowls, five teacups, but only two saucers. Glassware - just four stems - cloudy as an old man’s eye. Bed and table linens and towels worn by time to an indeterminate color, like a teaspoon of coal dust in a pint of heavy cream - the color of dirty soles and also the color of the plaster walls. The tiny fireplace might have been adequate for roasting a single sparrow over a fistful of twigs. V pulled open a cupboard drawer and found a sprinkling of mouse droppings. The oblong black nubs moved like suddenly magnetized iron fillings or swirled tea leaves until they settled and found their pattern on the drawer bottom.” Is that classic writing, or what? By the way, Mr. Frazier must be a fan of Cormac McCarthy because he also doesn’t use quotation marks, when a Frazier character talks, it’s usually preceded by a dash (-).

The story meanders through the different years of V’s life, from chapter to chapter. While this type of writing is sometimes distracting to the reader, in this case it’s not. The modus operandi chapter seems to be when V lives in Saratoga Springs, NY. It is 1906 and V is now 80 years old and living in a NY resort hotel, The Retreat, when a mulatto gentleman, carrying a blue book written by a Miss Botume, approaches the hotel desk and asks for Mrs. Davis. He believes that he is the boy, Jimmie, in the blue book written by Miss Botume. As Jimmie (James Blake) waits by the hotel’s fireplace to see if Mrs. Davis will receive him...suddenly he sees, “An elderly woman enter the great room from one of the corridors. She resembles later photographs of Queen Victoria - much taller, but with similar gravity and tiredness dragging from behind. Same hairstyle. Her dress a sheen of eggplant. She walks by the piano player and palms the small of her back to correct her posture.” I love this author’s writing! V says that she doesn’t recollect him or his name, James Blake. James says to V, “Yes, Ma’am. Thank you for seeing me. I’ll be brief. What I wanted to speak to you about concerns the war.” V is angry, tired of answering questions about the war and her husband, Confederate President Jefferson Davis. She turns to leave. James says, “My apologies, Mrs. Davis. I saw in the Albany paper that you were here, and I wanted to see you and ask about this book and about the children. I don’t recall all the names, but I remember Joe.” V says, “What could you possibly know about Joe?” V’s young son, Joe, fell off a building and died...Jimmie was there. V is stunned that he knew about Joe’s death. She asks James if he can bend his wrists all the way to his forearm. He does it. V, remembering that James was double jointed, says, “You’re Jimmie Limber (her made up name for him when he was a child in her care in Richmond, VA).” V says, “I don’t need a book to know you, I’ve believed for years that all my boys were long gone, crossed over. I’ve thought of it as my diminishing circle of boys pinching to a black point, like the period at the end of a sentence. But here you are. Sit down and I’ll tell you what I remember.” Gadzooks, all this and I’m only on page nine.

On page eleven, V strives to refresh Jimmie’s mind as to what happened in Richmond at the end of the Civil War in 1865. So you get the benefit of reading more of Charles Frazier’s excellent composition: “Things fell apart slowly before they fell apart fast. Late March - Friday night before Richmond burned - V fled the false White House and the capital city. That afternoon she and Ellen Barnes packed in a rush, knowing they might never be back. Billy and Jimmie went back and forth from V to Ellen, touching their arms or hips for reassurance. Ellen always kept her hair parted in the middle and oiled, pulled back tight against her scalp. But that day, long curling strands escaped, and she kept sweeping them back from her face...when the packing was done, Jeff (the president) took V aside and gave her a departure present. A purse pistol, slight and pretty, almost an art object suited for display in a museum.” “He said that if the country fell (the South), she should take the children to Florida and find passage to Havana. Then he told V to keep the little pistol with her at all times, and if Federals tried to violate her, she should shoot herself. Or if she couldn’t do that, at least fire it in their direction to make them kill her.” I know this book is historical fiction, but the author had me believing that every word was fact, not fiction. Incidentally, most of the characters in this novel were real people, including Jimmie Limber. I have left almost all of the characters and situations out of my review and instead decided to focus on the author’s superb writing. That’s great for you because you now have the whole story waiting for you to discover. In the next paragraph, I’ll give you one more example of the writer’s talent...then I’m outta here!

We’re back to 1906 Saratoga Springs, NY, near the end of V’s life. She’s having lunch with her young friend Laura Scott, an actress, who is accompanied by her mother and brother. Read how Charles Frazier describes how Mrs. Scott eats, or more appropriately chomps (haha): “Lunch arrives. Mrs. Scott talks while she eats, and the cavity of her mouth as she works her food makes sounds like a rubber plunger opening a sink drain. Chicken salad and lettuce at various stages of liquidation make repeat appearances between lips and teeth. She holds her fork as if her finger joints hardly articulate, a limp reluctance, as if other people’s hands usually do that job for her. She talks without letup, complaining of Laura’s expenses.” To me, this novel was a work of art.

Varina is the young wife of the widowed Jefferson Davis, who later becomes president of the Confederacy. Davis is still in love with his dead wife, whom he idealizes, and is away from home often due to his political career. As Davis becomes deeply involved in national politics, Varina enjoys her life as a society hostess among the powerful of the day. She's a flawed, fascinating character who survived the cataclysm of the Civil War (with help from the Confederate treasury and recreational laudanum) and now is settled into genteel old age. As she reflects back on her life, she's not above shading her past to appear more noble and heroic than the historical record supports.

*Varina* is a "literary" fiction, in the sense that it will mainly appeal to people who like Henry James, Faulkner, O'Connor, R.P. Warren, and so on. ....Just a head's up...This is not a page-turner....But if you like lingering over a page, this is your book...The man writes prose better than anyone around these days...If you think you don't like "literature" this incredible novel may change your mind...Pure poetry...

Varina by Charles Frazier tells the story of Varina Davis, wife of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. From their first meeting, to the violent end of the war and her subsequent flight from the South to the frayed years of Reconstruction and beyond. Now I know what you may be thinking--why would you read a novel about the wife of Jefferson Davis? I asked myself the same question when I picked it up. Curiosity, initially, I suppose. What was life like being married to a traitor? What compelled a wife to stay with her husband during and after something like that?

But here's the thing, this book does not in any way romanticize their marriage, the entire situation, the war, slavery--any of it. In fact, Varina falls very much along the same lines of Cold Mountain in its stark portrayal of violence and the brutality of humanity, as well as the disillusionment with war on both sides.

Varina seems like a series of vignettes jumping back and forth in time, framed by an elderly Varina recounting her story to a black man named James. As a boy, he'd been abandoned and she raised him as her own, despite having slaves herself.  Although James remembers Varina's care of him, he does not sugar coat asking her the hard questions about her place in the war and as the wife of Jefferson Davis. In this way, James acts as the reader, constantly asking why this, why that.

Varina was a woman of her time, like many of her day. There was speculation that she might have been mixed race, but from what I can find, this summation is just a theory. Some speculate may have had Creole ancestry. Her contemporaries often remarked on her dark coloring and somewhat "un-white" features. These aspects of Varina's physical appearance are brought into the novel with other girls teasing her, of adversaries spreading rumors. As far as I know, historically, it was speculation.
As a woman of her time, Varina was eighteen when she married widower Jefferson Davis who was thirty-seven. With few prospects for her future, a land-owning man was her best bet and Davis filled that role. When we talk about the wives of slave owners and Confederate rebels, do we also talk about complicity? Or do we talk about the innocence of these women? I think all of them existed somewhere on that spectrum, not necessarily strictly one or the other. As far as Varina is concerned...I don't know. Even after reading the novel, I still don't have a firm grasp on the character Frazier painted despite her sharp tongue, quick wit, and strength of spirit. But we can't talk about this novel and Varina herself without talking about complicity. At one point in the novel, James asks an older Varina why she took him in and raised him alongside her own son when she and Davis had slaves. Varina said she didn't know, but it later seems as if she did it to prove a point. It wasn't exactly altruistic. The Varina Frazier has constructed is very much a politician alongside her husband, making friends in both the North and the South before and after the war. She is adaptable and a survivor in this way, through charm and strength and intelligence. And yet....and yet. Varina claims she did not support her husband's ideals, and yet she lived her life benefiting from the comfort of them as well as later going down in flames with them. Historically, any wife with a husband who overreaches, who does something (or many things) bad, will most likely go down with him either in the eyes of the law or in the eyes of society--or both. Varina lives inside her husband's world, like many wives of the time. Perhaps taking James in was some sort of personal atonement for her husband's actions?

Like Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier illuminates the brutality on both sides of the American Civil War. And like Cold Mountain, Varina's flight from the South echoes Inman's journey in meeting vividly painted characters along the road. For Varina, the war seems more about survival for herself and her children. She never really has much of a relationship with Davis at all. The reader hardly gets to know him, in fact, as Frazier focuses more on Varina's relationships with her friends and children. And so, if Varina was so distant from her husband, can she too be held accountable for his actions? Should a wife be blamed for her husband's actions? I don't think so, unless she is actively participating in them. And yet, is silence the same as committing the act? Is silence worse? In a historical context, that's a hard question to answer. And yet, there were progressive people of that time who opposed slavery and/or believed in more rights for women. But Varina calls it like she sees it. She's a realist to her core, I think, even cynical.

Frazier's prose is beautiful and unique, although I did not feel as moved by or connected to this story as I did to Cold Mountain. Entire important events are glossed over and brushed aside, perhaps taking the realist and pragmatic approach of Varina herself. At times, I felt the manner of speech sounded too modern. However, a striking line within Varina really sums up all these themes, as well as resonates with things we are experiencing today:

"Choices of convenience and conviction, choices coincident with the people they lived among, following the general culture and the overriding matter of economics, money and its distribution, fair or not. Never acknowledging 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."

I feel as if as soon as Varina married Jefferson Davis, she knew her dark fate was sealed along side his, but had no choice but to ride that train with him until the bitter end.

I really enjoyed reading this book. It took me into a time past and showed me a perspective of the Civil War and its aftermath that was different and more interesting than those presented in old dried-up history books.
Charles Frasier writes with a poet's pen to create prose which is often almost poetry.
Varina was a historical figure I knew nothing about, but I feel as though I've watched her become real as the book follows her travels and travails.

This is a revelation of an interesting character usually overlooked and the plight of the citizenry of the south during and after this country's Civil War. It seems odd that a book whose protagonist is the wife of Jeff Davis makes such an eloquent argument for celebrating the people who actually fought the war rather than those who engineered its start.

The book is filled with history you probably have not read elsewhere.

This is, once again, Charles Frazier pulling the reader into an entirely compelling story. Historical fiction at its best. There are some who would find fault because they have their own opinions of why the people of the South fought, but if the reader can put aside prejudices, he or she can place himself or herself in the shoes of Varina. Both she and her husband, Jefferson Davis, were complex individuals. Despite hardship, despite the loss of loved ones, they dealt with it all and came out on the other side - not necessarily better, but not bitter either.
Of course, Frazier's language is a deep poetry that blends into prose. He paints a picture as no one else has done.
Truly fine literature.

Charles Frazier is a great talent. His first novel Cold Mountain received great praise from reviewers, readers put it on bestseller lists for years, and the novel won a National Book Award.

Varina Davis, born a northerner, was the confederacy's "first lady" having married Jefferson Davis several years before the Civil War's first shots. "Varina" is great--powerful, vivid, and told in many dimensions--as Cold Mountain. A generous book in its examination of a remarkable American's life, holding hard to the thread of Davis's flight, a fugitive from Northern troops.

Enjoyed this book and the first person account of her life. I knew nothing of Varina's story before this reading. Interesting the similarities that Mary Todd Lincoln and Varina's lives were. Enjoyed the book and storyline. Well worth reading.