June 2, 2010
There are times when I don't know if I can write another book review (after a year of writing one review a day) but then I read a book like The Lotus Eaters by Tatjana Soli and I can't wait to tell everyone: read this book! The Lotus Eaters is a beautiful and powerful book, providing a new viewpoint on an old but still painful and still relevant time for Americans and the world, the era of the Vietnam War. But it is more than that; The Lotus Eaters is the story of a woman defined by her work, addicted to its relevance and its pain, and on the cusp of either drowning in its fallout or in escaping into her future. This lush,
painful, and beautiful novel about a photo-journalist and her addiction
to the country of Vietnam during the Vietnam War covers everything
important in life: love, commitment, responsibility, survival, and
connection.
The book begins as Saigon is on the brink of takeover by the North Vietnamese, signaling the end of the war and the end of hope for hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese. For photo journalist Helen Adams the fall of Saigon means the end of what has been the most provoking and challenging engagement of her life. To her, it seemed like her photo-taking was "the most important work in the world. Leaving was like dying." What will she do now? Married to an injured Vietnamese reporter, she knows she must get her husband Linh out of the country but she herself is not ready to leave. She came to Vietnam years ago to find out the truth about her brother, a soldier killed in action, and now she can't imagine any other place in time or space worth documenting, living in, or loving.
The book proceeds in flashbacks through Helen's years in Vietnam, including a destructive but stimulating relationship with a Pulitzer-winning photo journalist, and her subsequent falling in with his assistant, Linh. The novel follows Linh backwards in time and documents the horrors he witnessed as a Vietnamese and the role he played in both the armies of the North and the South. Soli does not flinch from portraying the war as it was: scenes are graphically and carefully and slowly recreated, without melodrama but also without softening of the atrocities inflicted and endured. The reactions vary from soldiers to villagers to city dwellers to journalists (some who care and some who just want to get the best pictures and land a Pulitzer). Inhumanity was in abundance on all sides of the war, loyalties shifted, corruption flourished, promises were broken, and the ones who paid -- the ones who always pay -- were the civilians caught in the middle.
Helen remembers the moment her work became an addiction: she was watching "the sun rise up out of the east and color the western mountains from a dull blackish purple to green. So many shades of green...that Vietnamese legend told that every shade of green in the world originated in this mountain range. The emerald backbone of the dragon from which the people of Vietnamese sprang. Until then she had been blind, but when she saw those mountains, she slipped beneath the surface of the war and found the country."
Helen comes to realize the
purpose of her photos: to document the suffering so that the world
cannot ignore or forget the horrors, but also to find her own
redemption: "the dead entered the living, burrowed through the skin,
floated through the blood, to come at last to rest in the heart.
Stirring through the bits and pieces of the mystery of the young [dead]
girl, Helen imbibed her, would leave transmuted, brave and full of
courage, knowing her fear and determined enough to ignore it, courageous
enough at last to return home. Time to give up the war." But can
she go home again? Has her addiction to her work, and to the country and its people gone
too deep, holding her enthralled and imprisoned, much like the sailors
of Odysseus, caught in the land of the Lotus Eaters?
Helen lost her brother in the war and Linh lost his entire family; he watched them as they fell from injuries or as they left him to return to the remnants of his village, never to be seen again; there were those who died as he carried them; there were those he buried with the paper flowers that poor people used on their family altars: "The blossoms were paper, yellow faded, already dusty from mourning, but they were all I had left to give."
And yet at the end of all the horror, both Linh and Helen discover there is still beauty in being alive. They understand the wonder of life, as captured in the most powerful line of the novel: "after so much had been taken, so much could still be received." This line says it all: its simple and yet miraculous truth is the
only thing we need to guide us through suffering and loss. The Lotus Eaters is a great book, capable of changing forever anyone who reads it.
|
|