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The Lotus Eaters
- Winner of UK's James Tait Black Prize
- New York Times Notable Book of 2010
- American Library Association 2011 Notable Book
- Finalist LA Times Book Award
- A Kirkus Reviews Top Debut Fiction of 2010
- Bookmarks Magazine Best Literary Fiction of 2010
In the final days of a falling Saigon, The Lotus Eaters unfolds the story of three remarkable photographers brought together under the impossible umbrella of Helen Adams, a once-naïve ingénue whose ambition conflicts with her desire over the course of the fighting; Linh, the mysterious Vietnamese man who loves her, but is torn between conflicting loyalties to his homeland and his heart; and Sam Darrow, a man addicted to the narcotic of violence, to his intoxicating affair with Helen and to the ever-increasing danger of his job. All three become transformed by the conflict they have risked everything to record.
In this much-heralded debut, Tatjana Soli creates a searing portrait of three souls trapped by their impossible passions, contrasting the wrenching horror of combat and the treachery of obsession with the redemptive power of love.
- New York Times Notable Book of 2010
- American Library Association 2011 Notable Book
- Finalist LA Times Book Award
- A Kirkus Reviews Top Debut Fiction of 2010
- Bookmarks Magazine Best Literary Fiction of 2010
In the final days of a falling Saigon, The Lotus Eaters unfolds the story of three remarkable photographers brought together under the impossible umbrella of Helen Adams, a once-naïve ingénue whose ambition conflicts with her desire over the course of the fighting; Linh, the mysterious Vietnamese man who loves her, but is torn between conflicting loyalties to his homeland and his heart; and Sam Darrow, a man addicted to the narcotic of violence, to his intoxicating affair with Helen and to the ever-increasing danger of his job. All three become transformed by the conflict they have risked everything to record.
In this much-heralded debut, Tatjana Soli creates a searing portrait of three souls trapped by their impossible passions, contrasting the wrenching horror of combat and the treachery of obsession with the redemptive power of love.
389 pages, Paperback
First published March 29, 2010
About the author
Tatjana Soli
6 books319 followersTatjana Soli is an American novelist and short-story writer. Her first novel, The Lotus Eaters (2010), won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Book Prize, was a New York Times Bestseller, and a New York Times 2010 Notable Book. Her second novel, The Forgetting Tree (2012) was a New York Times Notable Book. Soli's third novel, The Last Good Paradise, was among The Millions "Most Anticipated" Books of 2015. Her fourth novel was published by Sarah Crichton Books in June 2018 and has been chosen as a New York Times Editors' Choice. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications including The New York Times Book Review.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,794 reviews
June 13, 2020
Update... This is such a wonderful book.
It’s a kindle download today for $1.99. I can’t recommend it enough.
Great price for an outstanding read!!!!
Older ... semi review...
I loved the 'Lotus Eaters' (I don't think I took time to write reviews on Goodreads at the time when I read it).
I loved 'The Lotus Eaters' so much that I pre-ordered Tatjana Soli's 2nd book "The Forgetting Tree". (which I'm now reading).
Its also 'fantastic'! (very engaging...'a page turner')
My only regret...(I gave away my signed copy of "The Lotus Eaters" (the beautiful hard copy). Some books are worth keeping and re-reading... "The Lotus Eaters" is that type of book!
Damn....(I blew it)....
However, I have a 2nd chance of recovery with "The Forgetting Tree". (I love this story 'as' much). I'm keeping this copy.
Tatjana will be in the Bay Area speaking Nov. 1st (Kepler's Book Store in Menlo Park).
I can't wait to hear her speak again. This time I will have finished reading it 'before' seeing her. (very fun).
Both books written 'beautiful'.
It’s a kindle download today for $1.99. I can’t recommend it enough.
Great price for an outstanding read!!!!
Older ... semi review...
I loved the 'Lotus Eaters' (I don't think I took time to write reviews on Goodreads at the time when I read it).
I loved 'The Lotus Eaters' so much that I pre-ordered Tatjana Soli's 2nd book "The Forgetting Tree". (which I'm now reading).
Its also 'fantastic'! (very engaging...'a page turner')
My only regret...(I gave away my signed copy of "The Lotus Eaters" (the beautiful hard copy). Some books are worth keeping and re-reading... "The Lotus Eaters" is that type of book!
Damn....(I blew it)....
However, I have a 2nd chance of recovery with "The Forgetting Tree". (I love this story 'as' much). I'm keeping this copy.
Tatjana will be in the Bay Area speaking Nov. 1st (Kepler's Book Store in Menlo Park).
I can't wait to hear her speak again. This time I will have finished reading it 'before' seeing her. (very fun).
Both books written 'beautiful'.
December 6, 2017
In the final days of a falling Saigon, this story is told of photographers covering the war. But more importantly, it's told from the point of view of a woman photographer. Helen Adams is young, she drops out of college and goes to Vietnam as she wants to go before the war is over. Also, her brother was killed there and she wants to find out more about it. Her story is told of her two lovers and fellow photographers. Linh, a local Vietnamese man who is haunted by his past and Darrow, an American who thrives on capturing the war on film.
What I liked about this one is that it was told from the point of view of a woman. Back during this time, it seemed almost unheard of. Helen is young and naive and you watch her grow through the telling of her story. You watch how she changes so much as she is so conflicted by everything that she sees. At times, I was so aggravated by her. She shows up, not knowing too much about photography, and is embedded with troops, taking photos. They are worried about 'seeing a woman hurt in war' and how it would effect the men. She arrives and immediately jumps into Darrows bed, knowing he's a married man. She starts to get stronger and some of the stuff she shoots is incredible. But the first sign of something difficult mentally for her, she flees. But no matter how much I was disappointed in her actions, I still liked her and wanted her to succeed. She then turns to Linh, where she transforms even more. All of the characters are transformed by the war.
I have never read a book around this time/area and at times I felt lost not know the history. But that's just me, wanting to learn more about this history. It's a fascinating story and one that made me gasp out loud at one point, which is rare for me. I listened to the audio and loved it. Listening to it made me think this is such a beautiful story with horrors included. Such a strange mix. I'm so glad I read this one and look forward to reading more of this time period.
What I liked about this one is that it was told from the point of view of a woman. Back during this time, it seemed almost unheard of. Helen is young and naive and you watch her grow through the telling of her story. You watch how she changes so much as she is so conflicted by everything that she sees. At times, I was so aggravated by her. She shows up, not knowing too much about photography, and is embedded with troops, taking photos. They are worried about 'seeing a woman hurt in war' and how it would effect the men. She arrives and immediately jumps into Darrows bed, knowing he's a married man. She starts to get stronger and some of the stuff she shoots is incredible. But the first sign of something difficult mentally for her, she flees. But no matter how much I was disappointed in her actions, I still liked her and wanted her to succeed. She then turns to Linh, where she transforms even more. All of the characters are transformed by the war.
I have never read a book around this time/area and at times I felt lost not know the history. But that's just me, wanting to learn more about this history. It's a fascinating story and one that made me gasp out loud at one point, which is rare for me. I listened to the audio and loved it. Listening to it made me think this is such a beautiful story with horrors included. Such a strange mix. I'm so glad I read this one and look forward to reading more of this time period.
July 31, 2014
Initially set against the fall of Saigon and then flashing back to the early 1960's, Tatjana Soli's The Lotus Eaters evokes the hypnotic horrors of war set against a lush, culturally rich landscape that lured many photojournalists during the Vietnam War. Falling victim to the intoxicating mix of adrenaline, fear, curiosity, and self-righteousness, they--just as the lotus eaters of Homer's The Odyssey--forsake their homelands as war becomes their passion and their comfort.
The novel focuses on Helen Adams, a naive, uninitiated field photographer whose desire to connect with the military life of her father and her brother leads her to Saigon. A born tomboy, Helen has always resented being shut out of the masculine pursuits she longed to be a part of and quickly finds her experience in Vietnam is to be no exception. As a woman in war, she's viewed as a curiosity, a sexual object, a harbinger of bad luck, an inconvenience. However, her tenacity and her willingness to stoically endure the soldiers' hardships begins to earn her a grudging respect. It also helps that she's willing to understand and experience Vietnam in a way other Americans aren't--to look beyond the headlines and the government shading of events; to know its people and its culture: "That was the experience in Vietnam: things in plain view, their meaning visible only to the initiated" (7).
Soli's characterization of Helen is presented as a woman who is constantly evolving, growing as she tests herself in the ultimate masculine sphere and as she confronts her own hypocrisies in pursuing one iconic image that will capture all the horror, all the waste, and all the courage of war. Helen knows the power of photographs to change the hearts and minds that really matter, those of the Americans back home, and, as such, "Pictures could not be accessories to the story--evidence--they had to contain the story within the frame; the best picture contained a whole war within one frame" (118). At the same time, she knows her craving for such a photograph is that of an addict's and will never be sated; as soon as she has a photograph that seems to define everything she wants to communicate, she knows she'll take increasingly dangerous risks as she tries to top previous successes.
The novel also presents the stories of two men who will help define Helen's life in Vietnam: Sam Darrow, a veteran war photographer whose only home is in conflict, and his aide, Linh, a photographer and translator who has belonged to and been damaged by both Vietnamese armies. Through these two men, Helen learns the toll war takes on those tasked with documenting its reality. While not equal to the burden of the young men in battle, the weight of being the one behind the lens, bearing witness to atrocity after atrocity, comes with its own spiritual price.
As lovely as the cover is, it's also deceiving. It's clearly marketed to a female historical fiction audience, so I feared it would be a torrid love story set against a Vietnam that was as authentic as a 1940's sound stage, with maybe a water buffalo roaming through for a dash of "authenticity." While there is a realistic romantic element involved, the real love story is between the photographers and the war. Soli has done her research and the Vietnam in her novel is fully realized: its beauty, its filth, its people, its cities, and its jungles. Her war scenes are harrowing, brutal and realistic, and seeing them through the eyes of a female photojournalist is a uniquely satisfying point of view for a war novel.
Cross posted at This Insignificant Cinder and at Shelf Inflicted
The novel focuses on Helen Adams, a naive, uninitiated field photographer whose desire to connect with the military life of her father and her brother leads her to Saigon. A born tomboy, Helen has always resented being shut out of the masculine pursuits she longed to be a part of and quickly finds her experience in Vietnam is to be no exception. As a woman in war, she's viewed as a curiosity, a sexual object, a harbinger of bad luck, an inconvenience. However, her tenacity and her willingness to stoically endure the soldiers' hardships begins to earn her a grudging respect. It also helps that she's willing to understand and experience Vietnam in a way other Americans aren't--to look beyond the headlines and the government shading of events; to know its people and its culture: "That was the experience in Vietnam: things in plain view, their meaning visible only to the initiated" (7).
Soli's characterization of Helen is presented as a woman who is constantly evolving, growing as she tests herself in the ultimate masculine sphere and as she confronts her own hypocrisies in pursuing one iconic image that will capture all the horror, all the waste, and all the courage of war. Helen knows the power of photographs to change the hearts and minds that really matter, those of the Americans back home, and, as such, "Pictures could not be accessories to the story--evidence--they had to contain the story within the frame; the best picture contained a whole war within one frame" (118). At the same time, she knows her craving for such a photograph is that of an addict's and will never be sated; as soon as she has a photograph that seems to define everything she wants to communicate, she knows she'll take increasingly dangerous risks as she tries to top previous successes.
The novel also presents the stories of two men who will help define Helen's life in Vietnam: Sam Darrow, a veteran war photographer whose only home is in conflict, and his aide, Linh, a photographer and translator who has belonged to and been damaged by both Vietnamese armies. Through these two men, Helen learns the toll war takes on those tasked with documenting its reality. While not equal to the burden of the young men in battle, the weight of being the one behind the lens, bearing witness to atrocity after atrocity, comes with its own spiritual price.
As lovely as the cover is, it's also deceiving. It's clearly marketed to a female historical fiction audience, so I feared it would be a torrid love story set against a Vietnam that was as authentic as a 1940's sound stage, with maybe a water buffalo roaming through for a dash of "authenticity." While there is a realistic romantic element involved, the real love story is between the photographers and the war. Soli has done her research and the Vietnam in her novel is fully realized: its beauty, its filth, its people, its cities, and its jungles. Her war scenes are harrowing, brutal and realistic, and seeing them through the eyes of a female photojournalist is a uniquely satisfying point of view for a war novel.
Cross posted at This Insignificant Cinder and at Shelf Inflicted
January 19, 2019
Wow, this is a great debut novel. The story takes place during the Vietnam War, towards the end. In the novel, Helen Adams is the first female journalist to be allowed into combat areas.
This is a richly imagined novel with breathtaking details of the country so vivid I could envision it.
The characters were well drawn and I felt that I could really understand how they felt and acted.
There are many different relationships that make this book great. The story of the war of course is tragic.
This is a great read for anyone who loves creative writing. It is historical fiction based on fact, as noted by the author, the characters are just incedible.
I would recommend this book to everyone!
This is a richly imagined novel with breathtaking details of the country so vivid I could envision it.
The characters were well drawn and I felt that I could really understand how they felt and acted.
There are many different relationships that make this book great. The story of the war of course is tragic.
This is a great read for anyone who loves creative writing. It is historical fiction based on fact, as noted by the author, the characters are just incedible.
I would recommend this book to everyone!
October 2, 2011
My thoughts:
This one punched me deep in my gut....I literally sobbed for 15 minutes after I finished the last page. All of these emotions were swirling within my chest and brain and I needed to release them with a good cry. I am just beginning to understand why my two uncles that served in Vietnam never spoke of their experience. Who would want to revisit those horrors, to have those images dredged up again, to make them real once more? I felt shell-shocked and wounded deep in my soul by the evil of war and how it brings out the worst in people. This book literally took me to the steamy and pungent jungles of Vietnam, the dirty streets of Saigon, and into a world that I couldn't begin to fathom. The characters were alive and jumped off of the pages. I found myself so engrossed in this story that I didn't want to put it down. This book is a powerhouse and will not leave my memory any time soon. I understand that some people can not read about war and all of the horrible things that were inflicted upon our soldiers and the people of Vietnam, but to me this is such an important book to read as it took me deep into Vietnam and gave me perspectives from both sides. This is an author to watch for as she seriously understands her audience and delivers a book that will move you beyond words! Trust me when I say, "READ IT!!!"
This one punched me deep in my gut....I literally sobbed for 15 minutes after I finished the last page. All of these emotions were swirling within my chest and brain and I needed to release them with a good cry. I am just beginning to understand why my two uncles that served in Vietnam never spoke of their experience. Who would want to revisit those horrors, to have those images dredged up again, to make them real once more? I felt shell-shocked and wounded deep in my soul by the evil of war and how it brings out the worst in people. This book literally took me to the steamy and pungent jungles of Vietnam, the dirty streets of Saigon, and into a world that I couldn't begin to fathom. The characters were alive and jumped off of the pages. I found myself so engrossed in this story that I didn't want to put it down. This book is a powerhouse and will not leave my memory any time soon. I understand that some people can not read about war and all of the horrible things that were inflicted upon our soldiers and the people of Vietnam, but to me this is such an important book to read as it took me deep into Vietnam and gave me perspectives from both sides. This is an author to watch for as she seriously understands her audience and delivers a book that will move you beyond words! Trust me when I say, "READ IT!!!"
August 17, 2023
…we reached the country of the Lotus-eaters, a race that eat the flowery lotus fruit…. Now these natives had no intention of killing my comrades; what they did was give them some lotus to taste. Those who ate the honeyed fruit of the plant lost any wish to come back and bring the news. All they now wanted was to stay where they were with the Lotus-eaters, to browse on the lotus, and to forget all thoughts of return. – Homer, The Odyssey
Her father and brother served in the military. Both were killed; her father in Korea; and her brother in Vietnam.
After her brother’s death, Helen Adams dropped out of college, took minimal training in the art of photography, and flew to Vietnam in an attempt to become a combat photographer, and also to learn the true circumstances surrounding her brother’s death. Officially, he had died a hero, but she didn’t think that was an apt description of her brother and she wanted to know the truth. But that wasn’t the only question for which she was seeking an answer, perhaps not even the main one. Her other question was about her – a question that she could not even formulate, much less answer.
Sam Darrow, a veteran war photographer who had made a name for himself in several global hotspots prior to coming to Vietnam, took Helen under his wing and educated her in the tricks of the trade, primarily, how to stay alive. Against all odds, Helen became an accomplished photographer and was eventually hired by Life magazine.
The mentor-protégé relationship soon blossomed into a romance, despite the fact that Sam was almost twenty years older and had a wife and young son back home.
A third important character in the story is Linh, a young Vietnamese man who served first as Sam’s assistant and later Helen’s. Of the three, he is the most complex.
About the same age as Helen, his life had been characterized by the kind of tragedy that most would find to be incomprehensible, unless they happened to have been among the Vietnamese who were trapped in a war between communist North Vietnam and the puppet governments in the south that were first propped up by the French and later by the Americans. Like most of the Vietnamese in the south, he didn’t support either side, but just wanted what they wanted, which was to live in peace.
The passage from The Odyssey that I quoted above serves as an epigraph to Soli’s book. But was it Vietnam -- or was it the war – or both -- that served as the narcotic that prevented Sam and Helen and other journalists from going home?
"The cool thing for us is that when this one’s done, there’s always another one, Middle East, Africa, Cambodia, Laos, Suez, Congo, Lebanon, Algeria. The war doesn’t ever have to end for us.” – Sam Darrow
That seems to answer the question.
Tatjana Soli was an accomplished short story writer, but The Lotus Eaters, published in 2010, was her debut novel. She worked on it for ten years and it paid off. The book became a best seller, perhaps helped by the fact that the United States found itself mired in, not just one, but two foreign wars, with some calling for a U.S. presence in other places.
It is not the first novel about combat photographers in Vietnam that I have read, but it is the first about a female photographer. There were only a handful of them in that war, but they were there. Solis made herself a student of the war, including the photographers, especially the female ones. Helen and Sam are composites of actual people, some of whom died while pursuing their pictures, including Dickey Chapelle who became the first American female correspondent to be killed in action.
Before I joined Goodreads, a friend, knowing that I had read a ton of books, fiction and nonfiction, about Vietnam, recommended The Lotus Eaters to me. However, she cautioned me not to be put-off by the cover, which I would have been. She was right when she said that the book’s cover was a total misrepresentation of the story.
Eventually, I ran across the book on the bargain shelf of the big-box store and remembering my friend’s glowing praise of the book, I bought it. It went on a shelf unread and remained there for years. Then recently it was reported that President Biden is going to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan and Iraq. That caused me to flash back to 1975 and the fall of Saigon. Even though I had not read The Lotus Eaters I did remember reading the first few pages of the first chapter which begins with the fall of the capital city. And now we would be leaving Afghanistan and the Taliban would be sure to reassert its control over that country and there would probably be a civil war between the various factions in Iraq.
It would almost be like we had never been there. Almost.
It seemed like the right time to read The Lotus Eaters.
June 21, 2016
I had such high hopes for this book. Basically it’s the story of a young woman combat photographer in Vietnam towards the end of the war, Helen Adams, and the two men she loves – Sam Darrow (a seasoned photographer who has a reputation), and Linh (the Vietnamese man who is Darrow’s and then Helen’s assistant).
I didn’t find anything about the relationships believable. I didn’t feel the passion or tenderness or compassion or love between any of them. The mark of good writing is that the author will show, not tell; Soli tells the reader over and over that these people love one another, but she doesn’t show us this. In fact, she shows us the opposite. Each of them seems closed off emotionally from anyone else; each follows his/her own agenda without regard to the feelings of anyone else; each of them behaves poorly (to say the least) in relation to the others. I thought they took foolish chances and I really didn’t care what happened to any of them; I just wanted it to be over with so I could get on with another book.
So why did I give it 2 stars? Soli includes a long bibliography of works she used to research Vietnam and Southeast Asia during the time period portrayed in the book. I don’t know if she ever actually visited the country, but if she has not, then kudos to her for managing to convey such a sense of the atmosphere of the place. I could smell the tropical jungle, feel the torpidity brought on by heat and fatigue, and hear the din of traffic and busy city streets. I give her 2 stars for creating this atmosphere, but I really don’t recommend the book.
I didn’t find anything about the relationships believable. I didn’t feel the passion or tenderness or compassion or love between any of them. The mark of good writing is that the author will show, not tell; Soli tells the reader over and over that these people love one another, but she doesn’t show us this. In fact, she shows us the opposite. Each of them seems closed off emotionally from anyone else; each follows his/her own agenda without regard to the feelings of anyone else; each of them behaves poorly (to say the least) in relation to the others. I thought they took foolish chances and I really didn’t care what happened to any of them; I just wanted it to be over with so I could get on with another book.
So why did I give it 2 stars? Soli includes a long bibliography of works she used to research Vietnam and Southeast Asia during the time period portrayed in the book. I don’t know if she ever actually visited the country, but if she has not, then kudos to her for managing to convey such a sense of the atmosphere of the place. I could smell the tropical jungle, feel the torpidity brought on by heat and fatigue, and hear the din of traffic and busy city streets. I give her 2 stars for creating this atmosphere, but I really don’t recommend the book.
September 17, 2010
Wow! Can this really be Tatjana Soli's first novel? She pierces right through all the bullshit about war in general and the Vietnam debacle in particular. I've learned to steer clear of most novels about Vietnam because there's usually too much of the macho jungle combat detail. I'm glad I made an exception for The Lotus Eaters. Written by a woman about a woman---a photographer who shows up in Vietnam in 1965 with no idea what she's doing or how it will change her life.
I'm glad I stayed with this one. The first chapter was long and confusing and I almost gave up, but it gets much better after that.
I'm glad I stayed with this one. The first chapter was long and confusing and I almost gave up, but it gets much better after that.
May 16, 2013
The perfect title. As readers, we give it little thought. By the time we see a book in its finished state, it’s a done deal. We consider its cover, the heft in our hands as we ponder the accolades on the back jacket or peruse the synopsis on the inside flap (I don’t know what e-reading sorts do – don’t you miss the feel of a book, the whisper and scent of paper and ink? Sigh.). At any rate, the right title is perhaps the most critical and taken-for-granted aspect of a book.
But the perfect title will be more than a quote or an image from the book it fronts. It will carry a theme or act as a metaphor to summarize in a handful of words the book’s core. Such titles seems as if the book was written around them
And so it is with The Lotus Eaters. As depicted in Homer’s The Odyssey, the Lotus Eaters were inhabitants of an island deep in the southern Mediterranean who ate from a native lotus, becoming indolent and apathetic - drugged by the flower’s narcotic. Odysseus’s sailors
Odyssey IX
It is an image used time and again by novelists, from James Joyce to Edith Wharton, and serves as the ideal metaphor for Tatjana Soli's debut novel The Lotus Eaters.
In Soli’s gorgeous, fluid and haunting novel, the seductive narcotic is war. When mixed with ambition, desire and an exotic locale, it becomes an elixir custom-made to slake the thirst for adventure.
This novel expresses more clearly than any I can think of the allure of the war experience and the shame and confusion that accompanies the attraction. The story opens in April, 1975 as Saigon is overrun by the North Vietnamese Army, signaling the end of the war in Vietnam. Helen Adams, an American photojournalist, is torn between getting herself and her lover onto a chopper and out of the madness and her desire to capture this story of her lifetime.
Helen makes her decision and through that decision the reader is taken back ten years, to the start of Helen’s personal and professional journey through Vietnam. The Lotus Eaters is told principally from the perspective of Helen, but we also read through the voices of Linh, a Vietnamese photojournalist, and Sam Darrow, a celebrated, Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer. Both men become Helen's mentors and the focus of her passions.
Helen’s ambition to excel as a female photojournalist pushes her past the machismo of her fellow journalists, the barriers erected by the military against allowing women near the front, the horror of witnessing death and mutilation, the impossible fight against nature in the tropics and mountains of Southeast Asia, and her loneliness and fear, until all of these become the very source of her ambivalent addiction to recording the war in Vietnam. Vietnam becomes home. She learns its language, the rhythms of its seasons; its very scents and shadows become ingrained in her spirit.
The Lotus Eaters shows us the upside-down world of the wartime experience and how living on the edge heightens each emotion. Passion, anger, fear, joy intensify until they overshadow memories of “normal.” Helen even tries to return home, spending several weeks in the healing beauty of the California coast, but the pull of the Lotus is too strong. She returns to Vietnam, to assume her place at the front lines of the war.
Tatjana Soli’s writing is as lush and vivid as her setting. She can be heavy-handed with the metaphors, as if she’s trying too hard to bring you into this overgrown, overripe world, but this is easily forgiven. Her characters are complete, the story is compelling and the writer’s voice is strong and unique. The novel itself became a Lotus that I reluctantly set aside each day and was bereft when it came to an end.
Rarely do we see war’s front lines through the eyes of a woman; rarer still is ambivalence so richly presented without judgment or conclusion. An outstanding read.
But the perfect title will be more than a quote or an image from the book it fronts. It will carry a theme or act as a metaphor to summarize in a handful of words the book’s core. Such titles seems as if the book was written around them
And so it is with The Lotus Eaters. As depicted in Homer’s The Odyssey, the Lotus Eaters were inhabitants of an island deep in the southern Mediterranean who ate from a native lotus, becoming indolent and apathetic - drugged by the flower’s narcotic. Odysseus’s sailors
“…went about among the Lotus-eaters, who did them no hurt, but gave them to eat of the lotus, which was so delicious that those who ate of it left off caring about home, and did not even want to go back and say what had happened to them, but were for staying and munching lotus with the Lotus-eaters without thinking further of their return; nevertheless, though they wept bitterly I forced them back to the ships and made them fast under the benches. Then I told the rest to go on board at once, lest any of them should taste of the lotus and leave off wanting to get home, so they took their places and smote the grey sea with their oars."
Odyssey IX
It is an image used time and again by novelists, from James Joyce to Edith Wharton, and serves as the ideal metaphor for Tatjana Soli's debut novel The Lotus Eaters.
In Soli’s gorgeous, fluid and haunting novel, the seductive narcotic is war. When mixed with ambition, desire and an exotic locale, it becomes an elixir custom-made to slake the thirst for adventure.
This novel expresses more clearly than any I can think of the allure of the war experience and the shame and confusion that accompanies the attraction. The story opens in April, 1975 as Saigon is overrun by the North Vietnamese Army, signaling the end of the war in Vietnam. Helen Adams, an American photojournalist, is torn between getting herself and her lover onto a chopper and out of the madness and her desire to capture this story of her lifetime.
Helen makes her decision and through that decision the reader is taken back ten years, to the start of Helen’s personal and professional journey through Vietnam. The Lotus Eaters is told principally from the perspective of Helen, but we also read through the voices of Linh, a Vietnamese photojournalist, and Sam Darrow, a celebrated, Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer. Both men become Helen's mentors and the focus of her passions.
Helen’s ambition to excel as a female photojournalist pushes her past the machismo of her fellow journalists, the barriers erected by the military against allowing women near the front, the horror of witnessing death and mutilation, the impossible fight against nature in the tropics and mountains of Southeast Asia, and her loneliness and fear, until all of these become the very source of her ambivalent addiction to recording the war in Vietnam. Vietnam becomes home. She learns its language, the rhythms of its seasons; its very scents and shadows become ingrained in her spirit.
The Lotus Eaters shows us the upside-down world of the wartime experience and how living on the edge heightens each emotion. Passion, anger, fear, joy intensify until they overshadow memories of “normal.” Helen even tries to return home, spending several weeks in the healing beauty of the California coast, but the pull of the Lotus is too strong. She returns to Vietnam, to assume her place at the front lines of the war.
Tatjana Soli’s writing is as lush and vivid as her setting. She can be heavy-handed with the metaphors, as if she’s trying too hard to bring you into this overgrown, overripe world, but this is easily forgiven. Her characters are complete, the story is compelling and the writer’s voice is strong and unique. The novel itself became a Lotus that I reluctantly set aside each day and was bereft when it came to an end.
Rarely do we see war’s front lines through the eyes of a woman; rarer still is ambivalence so richly presented without judgment or conclusion. An outstanding read.
April 4, 2010
I watched the film The Hurt Locker recently. I have had difficulty putting my thoughts onto paper about it and so you haven't seen a review. One thing in particular that stood out for me, however, was the scene where Staff Sergeant James is grocery shopping, followed by a scene of him trying to talk to his wife about his experiences in the Iraq War as she prepares a meal. These are very revealing scenes. The soldier goes from intense and life threatening situations in Iraq to the every day monotony of life back home. His wife is not able to understand what he has been through, everything he has seen.
The violence and shared horrors, the adrenalin rush, the camaraderie and strong bonds that form between the soldiers, and the sense of duty and honor . . . War can change a person. It can make adjusting to home life upon return difficult. It is not uncommon for soldiers to return to battle even when they don't have to. Some feel most comfortable there in a way many of us who haven't experienced it can't even begin to understand. I thought of this as I read The Lotus Eaters. A different war, a different time period. A novel about photojournalists rather than a movie about soldiers. The pull of war, of danger, seduces some almost like a drug. It makes the title of Tatjana Soli's novel all the more fitting.
I was drawn to Soli's The Lotus Eaters because of the setting. The novel is set in Vietnam during the Vietnam War. It is the story of an American female photojournalist, Helen Adams, who is set on following in her father and brother's footsteps, wanting to know how her brother died and to experience some of what he must have as a soldier in the Vietnam War. It is also the story of Linh, a Vietnamese man who has lost everything and who is doing what he can to survive. And then there is Sam Darrow, an American photojournalist whose entire life is wrapped up in shooting wars.
The novel opens as Helen is making her way home to her apartment in Saigon where Linh, bedridden and in need of medical care, is waiting. The Americans are fleeing the city as the Communists take over, the final sign of a war lost. Helen struggles with whether to leave with Linh or stay to see the changeover first hand, capturing it on film. Her decision made, the novel, and her thoughts, shift to the past and the reader is taken to the moment she first arrived in Saigon and from there her story and that of Linh's and Darrow's unfold.
I fell in love with this novel from the very first word. My biggest regret is that I read the novel without my reading journal handy and so my notes are few, and I don't have a record of the many quotations that especially moved me. The author's writing is beautiful. There was a melancholy and underlying tension about it which helped to create the tone of the novel. None of the characters in the novel are perfect, each one flawed and multi-faceted. They are tormented but driven, eager but at times reluctant.
Helen changes quite a bit during her time in Vietnam. She arrives as a naive young woman, eager to make a name for herself and prove she can hold her own in a man's world. She has her work cut out for her and, even at her most fearful, she is courageous. As the novel progresses, Helen grows stronger and wiser but there is a recklessness there too, much like that of veteran photographer, Darrow, who finds comfort and meaning in war. He sees something in Helen, a hint himself in his younger years, but also someone who may finally be his match.
Linh's story intrigued me. He is Darrow's assistant and proves to be an invaluable companion. He is the biggest mystery of all throughout the novel, but as his personal story unfolds, I was even more drawn to him, and I couldn't help but wish I had known him in real life.
Through the author's words and the characters' eyes, I could understand their love/hate relationship with Vietnam. It is a beautiful country. The Vietnamese people were tenacious and adaptable. They had to be given the circumstances of the country's history. The author's knowledge and interest in Vietnam shined through on every page. She included a bibliography at the end of the book for those interested in reading more about the country. While her story is fiction, there is truth woven in. Soli did not take sides but presented a realistic and complicated picture of events in Vietnam at the time.
The Lotus Eaters is beautiful, dark, and thought provoking. War is cruel and Soli does not hold back from sharing the ugly side of it. Within it too, however, are sparks of humanity and compassion. The author does not leave that out either. In fact, it is often those moments, that help Helen through the darker moments. The Lotus Eaters is an amazing novel: a love story just as much as it is about the Vietnam War and the impact war can have on those touched by it. After having just finished it, I am still hesitant to pick up another book, still caught in its spell.
Source: Book provided by publisher for review.
The violence and shared horrors, the adrenalin rush, the camaraderie and strong bonds that form between the soldiers, and the sense of duty and honor . . . War can change a person. It can make adjusting to home life upon return difficult. It is not uncommon for soldiers to return to battle even when they don't have to. Some feel most comfortable there in a way many of us who haven't experienced it can't even begin to understand. I thought of this as I read The Lotus Eaters. A different war, a different time period. A novel about photojournalists rather than a movie about soldiers. The pull of war, of danger, seduces some almost like a drug. It makes the title of Tatjana Soli's novel all the more fitting.
I was drawn to Soli's The Lotus Eaters because of the setting. The novel is set in Vietnam during the Vietnam War. It is the story of an American female photojournalist, Helen Adams, who is set on following in her father and brother's footsteps, wanting to know how her brother died and to experience some of what he must have as a soldier in the Vietnam War. It is also the story of Linh, a Vietnamese man who has lost everything and who is doing what he can to survive. And then there is Sam Darrow, an American photojournalist whose entire life is wrapped up in shooting wars.
The novel opens as Helen is making her way home to her apartment in Saigon where Linh, bedridden and in need of medical care, is waiting. The Americans are fleeing the city as the Communists take over, the final sign of a war lost. Helen struggles with whether to leave with Linh or stay to see the changeover first hand, capturing it on film. Her decision made, the novel, and her thoughts, shift to the past and the reader is taken to the moment she first arrived in Saigon and from there her story and that of Linh's and Darrow's unfold.
I fell in love with this novel from the very first word. My biggest regret is that I read the novel without my reading journal handy and so my notes are few, and I don't have a record of the many quotations that especially moved me. The author's writing is beautiful. There was a melancholy and underlying tension about it which helped to create the tone of the novel. None of the characters in the novel are perfect, each one flawed and multi-faceted. They are tormented but driven, eager but at times reluctant.
Helen changes quite a bit during her time in Vietnam. She arrives as a naive young woman, eager to make a name for herself and prove she can hold her own in a man's world. She has her work cut out for her and, even at her most fearful, she is courageous. As the novel progresses, Helen grows stronger and wiser but there is a recklessness there too, much like that of veteran photographer, Darrow, who finds comfort and meaning in war. He sees something in Helen, a hint himself in his younger years, but also someone who may finally be his match.
Linh's story intrigued me. He is Darrow's assistant and proves to be an invaluable companion. He is the biggest mystery of all throughout the novel, but as his personal story unfolds, I was even more drawn to him, and I couldn't help but wish I had known him in real life.
Through the author's words and the characters' eyes, I could understand their love/hate relationship with Vietnam. It is a beautiful country. The Vietnamese people were tenacious and adaptable. They had to be given the circumstances of the country's history. The author's knowledge and interest in Vietnam shined through on every page. She included a bibliography at the end of the book for those interested in reading more about the country. While her story is fiction, there is truth woven in. Soli did not take sides but presented a realistic and complicated picture of events in Vietnam at the time.
The Lotus Eaters is beautiful, dark, and thought provoking. War is cruel and Soli does not hold back from sharing the ugly side of it. Within it too, however, are sparks of humanity and compassion. The author does not leave that out either. In fact, it is often those moments, that help Helen through the darker moments. The Lotus Eaters is an amazing novel: a love story just as much as it is about the Vietnam War and the impact war can have on those touched by it. After having just finished it, I am still hesitant to pick up another book, still caught in its spell.
Source: Book provided by publisher for review.
March 27, 2015
Typically, I avoid war books like the plague with a few notable exceptions (Tim O’Brien, Kevin Power). So The Lotus Eaters sat on my To Be Read shelf for nearly three years before I picked it up. And once I started reading, the house could have burned down around me – THAT’S how compelling it is.
Tatjana Soli’s main character, gutsy Helen Adams, is a photographer who feeds on the adrenalin rush of covering the war in Vietnam – an unwinnable war in which it is not unusual for a native Vietnamese to fight on each side as the war gets uglier. She will love and be loved by two men: Sam Darrow, a self-created American photographer who is hooked on the danger of war coverage and Linh, a Vietnamese photojournalist and former poet who is harboring explosive secrets. It has been a long time since I fell in love with a literary character, but I loved both these men – beautifully realized creations of the author.
Sam asks Helen, ”Don’t you think it’s a calling to live in danger just to capture the face of those who are suffering? To show their invisible lives to the world?” As Helen begins to realize, sometimes, the question is not quite that simple. Sometimes, the craving for danger becomes an end in itself, blotting out the original noble goals. While Darrow claims to want to “photograph the North and South in peace”, Linh knows better. He reflects, “Most of the time, the reality of a situation fell into a gray no-man’s-land in between. The Americans called it ‘the Vietnam war” and the Vietnamese called it ‘the American war”, to differentiate it from ‘the French War.’”
Eventually, Linh tells Helen, “You want to stand over the dead and cry, but that helps no one. That’s a tourist’s sensibility. Day after day I go out with photographers who are tourists of the war…The war is in my home.”
And so, Tatiana Soli raises the integral questions: how do we bear witness to war? Once you really “see”, can you ever go back to a complacent former life? What happens when the mind becomes inured and the photojournalist needs more and more danger to get the same high? And what happens when you become so transformed that you only feel human when life is on the edge?
Yet this book is far from philosophical. There are scenes that are so masterfully rendered that they will remain seared in my mind: the winning of hearts and minds that centers on a little girl and backfires, an insecure commander who orders one of his men into a suicide mission only to have that man choose his way to die, and most of all, the agony of the Vietnamese who are uprooted from ancestral homes and yet denigrated by their “saviors” (At one point, Helen dons a Vietnamese hat, only to be ordered to remove it; the men in the platoon all stomp over it).
I loved this book. I loved everything about it – the wonderfully fleshed-out characters, the racing plot, the underlying themes, the luscious prose. I envy those who are approaching it for the first time.
Tatjana Soli’s main character, gutsy Helen Adams, is a photographer who feeds on the adrenalin rush of covering the war in Vietnam – an unwinnable war in which it is not unusual for a native Vietnamese to fight on each side as the war gets uglier. She will love and be loved by two men: Sam Darrow, a self-created American photographer who is hooked on the danger of war coverage and Linh, a Vietnamese photojournalist and former poet who is harboring explosive secrets. It has been a long time since I fell in love with a literary character, but I loved both these men – beautifully realized creations of the author.
Sam asks Helen, ”Don’t you think it’s a calling to live in danger just to capture the face of those who are suffering? To show their invisible lives to the world?” As Helen begins to realize, sometimes, the question is not quite that simple. Sometimes, the craving for danger becomes an end in itself, blotting out the original noble goals. While Darrow claims to want to “photograph the North and South in peace”, Linh knows better. He reflects, “Most of the time, the reality of a situation fell into a gray no-man’s-land in between. The Americans called it ‘the Vietnam war” and the Vietnamese called it ‘the American war”, to differentiate it from ‘the French War.’”
Eventually, Linh tells Helen, “You want to stand over the dead and cry, but that helps no one. That’s a tourist’s sensibility. Day after day I go out with photographers who are tourists of the war…The war is in my home.”
And so, Tatiana Soli raises the integral questions: how do we bear witness to war? Once you really “see”, can you ever go back to a complacent former life? What happens when the mind becomes inured and the photojournalist needs more and more danger to get the same high? And what happens when you become so transformed that you only feel human when life is on the edge?
Yet this book is far from philosophical. There are scenes that are so masterfully rendered that they will remain seared in my mind: the winning of hearts and minds that centers on a little girl and backfires, an insecure commander who orders one of his men into a suicide mission only to have that man choose his way to die, and most of all, the agony of the Vietnamese who are uprooted from ancestral homes and yet denigrated by their “saviors” (At one point, Helen dons a Vietnamese hat, only to be ordered to remove it; the men in the platoon all stomp over it).
I loved this book. I loved everything about it – the wonderfully fleshed-out characters, the racing plot, the underlying themes, the luscious prose. I envy those who are approaching it for the first time.
January 19, 2011
On the positive side, it was a gripping story and was well written. However, for me, the negatives outweigh the positives. First, the perspective shifted from character to character in a dizzying manner that often left me wondering whose thoughts and feelings we were following. Second, it was full of cliches. At least three characters who said something like 'I'm a good luck charm' or 'all we have is time' were dead within 5 pages. There was the tough as nails special ops soldier with a heart of gold, the doomed naive idealistic soldier, corrupt journalist and inscrutable natives. These faults were pardonable, and Soli towards the end seemed to even be playing with some of these cliched symbols. However, for me, the worst part of this book was that I could not fully appreciate the motivation and emotions of the characters. The protagonist struggles to overcome her fears to become a respected war photographer, but then decides to take a month off to live in a village and let the war go on without her. After leaving that same village to the SVA who were torturing its residents, another character thinks this was the happiest day of his life. I understand the idea of conflicting emotions, but these were not even sensible or consistent with what we had come to know about the characters. And Soli had a tendency to assert feelings, rather than showing us how and why the characters acted the way they did. I think this was a good effort, but because there were so many good things about this novel it left me feeling even more disappointed at the end.
June 9, 2012
“Every good war picture is an antiwar picture. Why am I here otherwise?”
This was a wonderful book to read, one of the best of the many books I have read about Vietnam. It combines the horror of war with the beauty of the Vietnamese countryside; you experience the city, the jungle, the village. There is the strange confluence of periods of love and tenderness and peace with the overarching unpredictability of a war zone. It is a story about love, love of place, love of self, love of danger. And, of course, because it is about war, it is a story about death.
The source of the book title:
. . . we reached the country of the Lotus-eaters, a race that eat the flowery lotus fruit . . . Now these natives had no intention of killing my comrades; what they did was to give them the lotus to taste. Those who ate the honeyed fruit of the plant lost any wish to come back and bring us news. All they now wanted was to stay where they were with the Lotus-eaters, to browse on the lotus, and to forget all thoughts of return.
Homer, The Odyssey
The urban setting:
Saigon, November 1965
The late-afternoon sun cast a molten light on the street, lacquered the sidewalk, the doors, tables, and chairs of restaurants, the rickety stands of cigarettes, film, and books, all in a golden patina, even giving the rusted, motionless cyclos and the gaunt faces of the sleeping drivers the bucolic quality found in antique photos. The people, some stretched out on cots on the sidewalks, lazily read newspapers or toyed with sleep, waiting for the relief of evening to fall. This part of the city belonged to the Westerners, and the Vietnamese here were in the business of making money off them – either by feeding them in the restaurants, selling them the items from the rickety stands, driving them about the city in the rusted cyclos, having sex with them, spying on them, or some combination of the above.
The countryside:
They were dropped into this mud hole, didn’t know that the dry area on the map became a lake at the wrong time of the year, heavy and thick like quicksand, and they were stuck; when the bullets started flying they realized they had been ambushed; sitting ducks, the whole unit wiped out minutes off the plane. Crying shame.
In April 2011, two photojournalists, Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros, were killed in Libya. They were in the midst of the story of the war there. Journalists have been finding their way to the scene of the action in many war zones for a long time. You will hear the phrase, it makes me feel alive. (“She had not known how alive she was in Vietnam.”) Sometimes it makes them dead. You will think of the rush of adrenaline and the Pulitzer Prize. The Lotus Eaters is the story of a photojournalist, Helen Adams, her decade covering the war, the two men she loved as well as the country she came to love. In recent years, we have seen more and more journalists embedded in military combat units to cover the action directly and to write about their experiences. This book adds the humanity to that dry fact.
The Lotus Eaters is labeled as historical fiction. It is about imagined lives in a real war. It brings that war alive from the perspective of a woman in the midst of a war that she became addicted to. The author Tatiana Soli says, “This is a work of imagination, inspired by real people and events, but I’ve given myself the fiction-writer’s prerogative of blending and mixing, outright distorting and making up.”
I don’t write in books. I was taught not to do that a long time ago. But if I were to highlight what I consider the well written sentences and paragraphs and pages, there would be a lot of yellow in this book. Sometimes I use post it notes to mark the especially meaningful and well written. But in this case the book would begin to bulge from all the slips like an overfull album of photographs. No digital photos in this war.
This is a four star book that I would recommend to anyone who still wants to read about Vietnam all these years later. While it takes place in a past time, it is not dated. It is a book about people and a collision of cultures in Southeast Asia. As Helen said, “A woman sees war differently.”
September 9, 2016
Very atmospheric and at times brutal novel about the Vietnam War. Three intriguing main characters, Helen Adams a photo journalist, her colleague, reporter Sam Darrow, and a Vietnamese former soldier, Linh, who becomes a photojournalist in his own right. The inevitable love affairs (sequential, not simultaneous!) never quite rang true for me and there was something flat about the characters that I could not pin down, but I appreciated it for the extraordinary descriptions of battles and of a beautiful country destroyed in one of the most pointless wars the U.S. ever fought.
Content: PG (or maybe even R) for graphic battle scenes. Some sexual content.
Content: PG (or maybe even R) for graphic battle scenes. Some sexual content.
March 3, 2011
The Lotus Eaters, Tatjana Soli’s debut novel, is quite impressive, but not without its faults. It revolves around neophyte photojournalist, Helen Adams, who we first meet in 1975 in Saigon as the North Vietnamese begin to roll through the city, and the city falls. I guess I shouldn’t call Adams a neophyte photojournalist because she arrived in Vietnam in 1965, an idealistic California girl, fresh out of college, her only previous encounter with war being her father’s tales of fighting in the Korean War and her brother’s letters home. However, rather shockingly, her only experience with photography has been a high school class. When Helen arrives in Vietnam, she’s so naïve she doesn’t even know how to load her camera and has to ask one of her male counterparts to do it for her.
One the whole, The Lotus Eaters was nicely written, though Soli does seem to be asking her readers to “suspend their disbelief” a tad too much, as when Sam Darrow – a renowned and critically acclaimed photojournalist – takes Helen under his wing to “teach her the ropes.” Helen, while not achieving Darrow’s critical acclaim – he’s a Pulitzer Prize winner – does begin to make a name for herself, if only because she’s the Vietnam War’s first female photojournalist.
Predictably, Helen and the unhappily married Darrow not only work together, they begin a passionate love affair as well. Helen wants the couple to leave Vietnam; she wants Darrow to begin a new life with her, back in the relative safety of the US. Darrow, however, is consumed by his work, and he’s passionate about recording the events that are taking place in Vietnam. Eventually, Helen begins to be consumed as well:
Before, there had been this small, shiny thing inside her that had kept her immune from what was happening, and now she knew it had only been her ignorance, and she felt herself falling into a deep, dark place.
I suppose we could have predicted that The Lotus Eaters would revolve around those who were consumed with recording the happenings in Vietnam. In Greek mythology, the “lotus eaters” taste, and then become possessed by, a narcotic plant. In Homer’s Odyssey, a portion of which Soli uses as her novel’s epigraph, the lotus eaters are robbed of any desire to return to their own homeland.
When Linh, Darrow’s soldier-turned-photography assistant falls in love with Helen, the book takes another turn. Linh is a self-contained man, a mysterious figure, who has lost everything he ever loved to the war. As such, he’s able to see the war with a clarity that neither Helen nor Darrow can possess. Linh is not a person who romanticizes the cruelty of war, and though the war has taken from him everything he loves, he still feels deeply connected to his native country.
I found Linh to be the most complex and intriguing character in The Lotus Eaters. Soli expertly reveals his story by peeling back layer after layer, as though peeling an onion. Just when we think we really know Linh, we find he has yet another secret to share. He is thoroughly believable; his dilemmas feel real and authentic.
Linh is, of course, symbolic of all the Vietnamese people, people who suddenly found themselves strangers in their own homeland. In his role as a photographer’s assistant, Linh is an outsider in the war; he takes as little part in the Vietnamese side of the conflict as he does in the American side. He does, after all, have mixed allegiances to both the SVA and the NVA and to Darrow and to Helen. He embodies the conflict raging on around them. I thought Linh was a wonderful creation and I greatly admire Soli for the work she put into this character.
At times, Soli’s prose is spare and pared down. At other times, it’s almost poetic. Her description of Linh’s physical and emotional loneliness is especially poignant:
One came to love another through repeated touch, he believed, the way a mother bonded with her newborn, the way his family had slept in the communal room, brushing against one another, the patterning through nerve endings, a laying of pulse against pulse, creating a rhythm of blood, and so now he touched others, strangers, only fleetingly, without hope.
However, throughout the book, Soli is at her best when describing scenes of war:
The air boiled hot and opaque, the sky a hard, saline blue. For miles the black mangrove swamp spread like a stagnant ocean, clotted, arthritic. Farther on they passed the swollen tributaries of the Mekong. Papaya, grapefruit, water palm, mangosteen, orange—fruit of every variety grew in abundance, dropping with heavy thuds on the ground to burst in hot flower in the sun.
Beautiful.
Helen was fairly well drawn as the main character, however I have some problems with inconsistencies in the book. Christine Wicker, in the “Dallas Morning News” put it best, and I’m paraphrasing her words. At one point, Helen is so terrified of the war she finds herself involved in that she wets her pants while on patrol; in the next paragraph, she’s totally bored, and death, for her, seems to be some intellectual concept rather than something immediate and visceral. In another section, she describes a French woman with crimson lips, powdered skin, and penciled brows. On the very next page, this same French woman is described as very sparing with make up and taking painstaking work to look so natural. What?
Helen is presented to the reader as an intelligent and savvy woman, but even after months in Vietnam taking photos, she appears for her first battle assignment and has to ask another photographer to load her camera, as she doesn’t know how.
As Wicker concludes, Soli was probably just trying to show us Helen’s innocence and naiveté, however, if she was, the whole technique backfired on her. Helen, in these scenes, just comes across as an idiot.
Like Wicker, at that point, I found myself focusing more on Soli’s clumsiness than on the story or the characters. Miss Wicker went on to love the book; I went on to find it “just so-so.”
There’s no denying that Soli can write when she puts her mind to it. Helen begins to deal with grief and loss in the way many war victims deal with it – by pushing deeper and deeper into the war itself. Linh arranges for Helen to photograph the Ho Chi Minh trail, and Soli’s writing in these passages, regarding Helen’s grief, is exquisite:
After three days, Helen no longer thought of the crooked apartment or Saigon. Even Darrow changed from a pain outside, inflicted, to something inside, a tumor, with only its promise of future suffering. The vastness of the jungle struck her again in all its extraordinary voluptuousness, its wanton excess. It enchanted. Time rolled in long green distances, and she took comfort in the fact that the land would outlast them, would outlast the war—would outlast time itself.
All in all, I felt The Lotus Eaters could have been a very deep and wonderful book, one that embraced universal themes, but its deficiencies in craft caused it to miss the mark. It’s an uneven book, with prose that is spare and jarring at times and lofty and poetic at others. It asks much of the reader regarding the suspension of disbelief, and the ending feels rushed and is far too neat and tidy and too designed to please rather than being true to the vision set forth in the book’s first chapter.
I think Soli can become a major talent, but I don’t think this book quite lives up to the promises it makes in its very wonderful, and wonderfully written, first chapter.
3/5
Recommended: If you’re interested in the Vietnam War or the effects of war in general. While most books have concentrated on war from the perspective of those who are fighting, this book concentrates on the perspective of the photojournalist, a unique point of view. If you’re a picky reader like I am, however, the book’s deficiencies in craft might bother you as they did me.
You can follow my reviews at literarycornercafe.blogspot.com.
One the whole, The Lotus Eaters was nicely written, though Soli does seem to be asking her readers to “suspend their disbelief” a tad too much, as when Sam Darrow – a renowned and critically acclaimed photojournalist – takes Helen under his wing to “teach her the ropes.” Helen, while not achieving Darrow’s critical acclaim – he’s a Pulitzer Prize winner – does begin to make a name for herself, if only because she’s the Vietnam War’s first female photojournalist.
Predictably, Helen and the unhappily married Darrow not only work together, they begin a passionate love affair as well. Helen wants the couple to leave Vietnam; she wants Darrow to begin a new life with her, back in the relative safety of the US. Darrow, however, is consumed by his work, and he’s passionate about recording the events that are taking place in Vietnam. Eventually, Helen begins to be consumed as well:
Before, there had been this small, shiny thing inside her that had kept her immune from what was happening, and now she knew it had only been her ignorance, and she felt herself falling into a deep, dark place.
I suppose we could have predicted that The Lotus Eaters would revolve around those who were consumed with recording the happenings in Vietnam. In Greek mythology, the “lotus eaters” taste, and then become possessed by, a narcotic plant. In Homer’s Odyssey, a portion of which Soli uses as her novel’s epigraph, the lotus eaters are robbed of any desire to return to their own homeland.
When Linh, Darrow’s soldier-turned-photography assistant falls in love with Helen, the book takes another turn. Linh is a self-contained man, a mysterious figure, who has lost everything he ever loved to the war. As such, he’s able to see the war with a clarity that neither Helen nor Darrow can possess. Linh is not a person who romanticizes the cruelty of war, and though the war has taken from him everything he loves, he still feels deeply connected to his native country.
I found Linh to be the most complex and intriguing character in The Lotus Eaters. Soli expertly reveals his story by peeling back layer after layer, as though peeling an onion. Just when we think we really know Linh, we find he has yet another secret to share. He is thoroughly believable; his dilemmas feel real and authentic.
Linh is, of course, symbolic of all the Vietnamese people, people who suddenly found themselves strangers in their own homeland. In his role as a photographer’s assistant, Linh is an outsider in the war; he takes as little part in the Vietnamese side of the conflict as he does in the American side. He does, after all, have mixed allegiances to both the SVA and the NVA and to Darrow and to Helen. He embodies the conflict raging on around them. I thought Linh was a wonderful creation and I greatly admire Soli for the work she put into this character.
At times, Soli’s prose is spare and pared down. At other times, it’s almost poetic. Her description of Linh’s physical and emotional loneliness is especially poignant:
One came to love another through repeated touch, he believed, the way a mother bonded with her newborn, the way his family had slept in the communal room, brushing against one another, the patterning through nerve endings, a laying of pulse against pulse, creating a rhythm of blood, and so now he touched others, strangers, only fleetingly, without hope.
However, throughout the book, Soli is at her best when describing scenes of war:
The air boiled hot and opaque, the sky a hard, saline blue. For miles the black mangrove swamp spread like a stagnant ocean, clotted, arthritic. Farther on they passed the swollen tributaries of the Mekong. Papaya, grapefruit, water palm, mangosteen, orange—fruit of every variety grew in abundance, dropping with heavy thuds on the ground to burst in hot flower in the sun.
Beautiful.
Helen was fairly well drawn as the main character, however I have some problems with inconsistencies in the book. Christine Wicker, in the “Dallas Morning News” put it best, and I’m paraphrasing her words. At one point, Helen is so terrified of the war she finds herself involved in that she wets her pants while on patrol; in the next paragraph, she’s totally bored, and death, for her, seems to be some intellectual concept rather than something immediate and visceral. In another section, she describes a French woman with crimson lips, powdered skin, and penciled brows. On the very next page, this same French woman is described as very sparing with make up and taking painstaking work to look so natural. What?
Helen is presented to the reader as an intelligent and savvy woman, but even after months in Vietnam taking photos, she appears for her first battle assignment and has to ask another photographer to load her camera, as she doesn’t know how.
As Wicker concludes, Soli was probably just trying to show us Helen’s innocence and naiveté, however, if she was, the whole technique backfired on her. Helen, in these scenes, just comes across as an idiot.
Like Wicker, at that point, I found myself focusing more on Soli’s clumsiness than on the story or the characters. Miss Wicker went on to love the book; I went on to find it “just so-so.”
There’s no denying that Soli can write when she puts her mind to it. Helen begins to deal with grief and loss in the way many war victims deal with it – by pushing deeper and deeper into the war itself. Linh arranges for Helen to photograph the Ho Chi Minh trail, and Soli’s writing in these passages, regarding Helen’s grief, is exquisite:
After three days, Helen no longer thought of the crooked apartment or Saigon. Even Darrow changed from a pain outside, inflicted, to something inside, a tumor, with only its promise of future suffering. The vastness of the jungle struck her again in all its extraordinary voluptuousness, its wanton excess. It enchanted. Time rolled in long green distances, and she took comfort in the fact that the land would outlast them, would outlast the war—would outlast time itself.
All in all, I felt The Lotus Eaters could have been a very deep and wonderful book, one that embraced universal themes, but its deficiencies in craft caused it to miss the mark. It’s an uneven book, with prose that is spare and jarring at times and lofty and poetic at others. It asks much of the reader regarding the suspension of disbelief, and the ending feels rushed and is far too neat and tidy and too designed to please rather than being true to the vision set forth in the book’s first chapter.
I think Soli can become a major talent, but I don’t think this book quite lives up to the promises it makes in its very wonderful, and wonderfully written, first chapter.
3/5
Recommended: If you’re interested in the Vietnam War or the effects of war in general. While most books have concentrated on war from the perspective of those who are fighting, this book concentrates on the perspective of the photojournalist, a unique point of view. If you’re a picky reader like I am, however, the book’s deficiencies in craft might bother you as they did me.
You can follow my reviews at literarycornercafe.blogspot.com.
July 29, 2018
"يقع الإنسان في حب مكان جغرافي من خلال الناس و عندما يرحل الناس يصبح المكان باردا و غير شخصي"
هيلين آدمز من طالبة أمريكية إلى فتاة جموحة ساذجة تجد نفسها في مستنقع حرب الف��تنام كمصورة حرة...ما بين تلك الفتاة ذات الكعب العالي و الفستان الأنيق و ما بين صورة المرأة في أواخر الرواية رحلة عشر سنوات علها مضت و كأنها دهر...كعادة الأعمال الأدبية أو السنيمائية المتعلقة بالحروب (من وجهتي نظري على الأقل) فالرواية تثير في نفس القاريء كمَا هائلا, متسارعا و متناقضا في عدة أحيان, من المشاعر ...و هو ربما ما جعلني ألتهم صفحات الجزءين في يومين فقط ...ككل الرواية ممتازة و لن أتردد في الحصول على نسخة أنجليزية لو عثرت عليها و لكن أعيب على الكاتبة شيئا من الإطالة في الجزء الثاني و على المترجمة بعضا من الهنات في الجزء الأول
ملاحظة: النجمة الخامسة لا علاقة لها بالتقييم الأدبي و العقلاني للكتب بل إسنادها كان عاطفيا بإمتياز
تمت
00:48
30/07/2018
August 4, 2013
*eyeroll* What a book. Here's this narrator who is in Vietnam to photograph the war and doesn't know how to load film in her camera, but somehow she's gifted as all heck because a couple pages later she's scored the cover of LIFE magazine! Wheeee! That's one of hundreds of flaws in this character and the storyline. The writing around the relationships in the book was weak, while text describing the war were much stronger. Ultimately I groaned throughout the book, trudged through 2/3rds, and then surrendered. Flimsy execution of a potentially good story.
January 27, 2014
I truly disliked this book. The dislike (spoiler alert) started out when the author describes the evacuation of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War. In a split second decision, Helen abandons Linh on the departing helicopter (we've all seen the footage of the mad scramble to get on those last helicopters), but manages to scrounge up PAPER and PENCIL to write a note, PLASTIC BAG in which to place the note, and a STRING with which to secure the bag/note around Linh's note.
Then we are supposed to believe that Helen, who has either (1) no photographic experience because she does not even know how to load film, or (2) some photographic experience (come on author - which is it?) because she was on her high school yearbook staff and took photos of football games, quickly becomes a pro with her photos on the cover of Life? Yet in going through Darrow's things later, she can see his evolution as a photographer over two decades. WOW! Quick study, Helen!
I compiled a whole list of annoyances about this book that a good editor should have caught. These details make an already unbeleivable story just grating.
My second favorite: Helen tells a soldier smoking a cigarette in 1965 that "smoking is bad for you." In the middle of a war zone?
Then we are supposed to believe that Helen, who has either (1) no photographic experience because she does not even know how to load film, or (2) some photographic experience (come on author - which is it?) because she was on her high school yearbook staff and took photos of football games, quickly becomes a pro with her photos on the cover of Life? Yet in going through Darrow's things later, she can see his evolution as a photographer over two decades. WOW! Quick study, Helen!
I compiled a whole list of annoyances about this book that a good editor should have caught. These details make an already unbeleivable story just grating.
My second favorite: Helen tells a soldier smoking a cigarette in 1965 that "smoking is bad for you." In the middle of a war zone?
September 9, 2011
This is a book about the Viet Nam War and the fall of Saigon but it is so much more. It is a bout a naive young photographer who wants to take pictures of what is going on. It is about relationships and how war changes everyone and everything it touches, people in the country, fighting in the country, none will ever be the same. It has given me more compassion with the people who try to return from these intense experiences and once again adjust to a society that is worried about what to buy or what to wear. The author does a wonderful job of showing this by relating the growth of the 3 main characters with the war always in evidence, always in the backdrop. Extremely well done.
July 26, 2011
I'd heard some good things about this book, and it had some good reviews, so I picked it up. I'm always willing to read something a little different.
This was a historical fiction work about the Vietnam War. The main character is a female photographer who kinda stumbles into becoming a star photographer of the war, and how living amid the war, and in Vietnam shaped and changed her life.
The book was okay, as it took me awhile to sort of get into it. I kept hoping for more. The writing was fine, as was the storytelling. But I think what I found lacking for me, was the character development.
I usually dislike first person narrations, but I wonder if this book might have been helped by it. I had a very hard time getting a sense of Helen, the female main character. I don't know if I knew who she was throughout. Maybe she didn't know who she was when she got there, but I never really felt a connection to her, her loves, her losses, her life. It was almost as I was being TOLD who she was, instead of going on this journey with her.
It probably also didn't help, in my opinion, that the book begins almost at the end of the story. I know who she's "with" and that another major character has died. But then, chapter two jumps to more than ten years earlier, and so begins the story that I know how it will end, which somewhat spoils the journey.
This was a historical fiction work about the Vietnam War. The main character is a female photographer who kinda stumbles into becoming a star photographer of the war, and how living amid the war, and in Vietnam shaped and changed her life.
The book was okay, as it took me awhile to sort of get into it. I kept hoping for more. The writing was fine, as was the storytelling. But I think what I found lacking for me, was the character development.
I usually dislike first person narrations, but I wonder if this book might have been helped by it. I had a very hard time getting a sense of Helen, the female main character. I don't know if I knew who she was throughout. Maybe she didn't know who she was when she got there, but I never really felt a connection to her, her loves, her losses, her life. It was almost as I was being TOLD who she was, instead of going on this journey with her.
It probably also didn't help, in my opinion, that the book begins almost at the end of the story. I know who she's "with" and that another major character has died. But then, chapter two jumps to more than ten years earlier, and so begins the story that I know how it will end, which somewhat spoils the journey.
May 1, 2011
Finished the Lotus Eaters on May 1. This is a great account of that war that made headlines and dominated the lives of my generation from the late 60s to the late 70s. While I was traveling around the world and living the story of my book, Living Beneath the Radar, I arrived in Bangkok the day the last helicopters pulled out of Saigon, in Vietnam. The author takes the present day reader back to that country leading up to the dramatic end and the chaos that existed in the neighboring countries of South Vietnam.
This war was by far the most conscience changing "non war" America has ever experienced. We no longer have the draft because of Vietnam and the protests that happened in the states. America is still filled with those who fought for the military and those who fought against the international policies of America. People always say one usually learns from those experiences of war. Today we have Iraq and Afghanistan. I cannot say we have learned anything from Vietnam regarding our policies of today. Read the Lotus Eaters and tell me what you think.
Jeff
This war was by far the most conscience changing "non war" America has ever experienced. We no longer have the draft because of Vietnam and the protests that happened in the states. America is still filled with those who fought for the military and those who fought against the international policies of America. People always say one usually learns from those experiences of war. Today we have Iraq and Afghanistan. I cannot say we have learned anything from Vietnam regarding our policies of today. Read the Lotus Eaters and tell me what you think.
Jeff
September 21, 2013
"He was like one of Homer's lotus eaters. He simply forgot all thoughts of return."
The novel opens as the US troops are pulling out of Vietnam in 1975, and photojournalist Helen Adams is walking the streets of Saigon, feeling familiar and close to the city. She's been here over a decade, and is conflicted about leaving this now refugee town to go back to the states.
She walks to the apartment she shares with her lover and also photographer, Linh, a Vietnamese who has been injured. She is anxious to get him on the helicopter out of there, with the intention of joining him after she goes on one final shoot. However, she is eternally compelled by that one great shot, the photo that will secure her name in the history of war photographers. Her mentor and previous lover, Sam Darrow, had already done that, but, like Helen, was hooked to the place, the job, the dynamic of war photography.
Following the memorable scene after the Fall of Saigon, one that is canonized in the iconic image of South Vietnamese civilians desperately trying to secure a seat on one of the last American helicopters shuttling between Saigon rooftops and US navy ships off the coast of Vietnam (ahead of the arrival of the communist North-Vietnamese troops), the story starts at the beginning of Helen's life here, back in 1965. We follow her from the her complete innocence as a new photographer and survivor in a war-torn country; through the grisly action of capturing combat scenes on film; and in the inflamed and tender scenes of romance.
If I ever were to recommend one novel on the Vietnam War, this would be it. Unless you only want battle action and an all male cast--such as MATTERHORN--I endorse this book as a poised and exquisite balance between love and war, and a love for the adrenaline-fueled action of war. As photographers, Helen, Sam, and Linh strive for the pictures that, in their individual quests, are a sort of anti-war document, an up close and personal edification of the fallout and consequences of what the US called a "skirmish." The inner conflicts of getting that award-winning shot subsumes the guilt and shame of potential exploitation and the desire to keep on following the next knell or knoll of death. What of their photography? Are they interpreters of violence? Are they, as Sam Darrow feared, making war "palatable"?
As Helen thought, "No getting around the ghoulishness of pouncing on tragedy with hungry eyes, snatching it away, glorying in its taking even among the most sympathetic `I got an incredible shot of a dead soldier/woman/child. A real tearjerker.' Afterward, film shot, they sat on the returning plane with a kind of postcoital shame, turning away from each other."
As a personal story, Soli beautifully braided, twisted, and integrated the photojournalists' addiction to war and their desperate kinds of love or lust, the difficult choices and bonds that form, bonds that may never work anywhere else but in the midst of battle scarred endurance. This is one of my favorite contemporary novels of all time. By the end of this visceral, emotionally electrifying novel, I forgot all thoughts of return to the real world. I wanted to stay with these characters. I was a lotus eater.
The novel opens as the US troops are pulling out of Vietnam in 1975, and photojournalist Helen Adams is walking the streets of Saigon, feeling familiar and close to the city. She's been here over a decade, and is conflicted about leaving this now refugee town to go back to the states.
She walks to the apartment she shares with her lover and also photographer, Linh, a Vietnamese who has been injured. She is anxious to get him on the helicopter out of there, with the intention of joining him after she goes on one final shoot. However, she is eternally compelled by that one great shot, the photo that will secure her name in the history of war photographers. Her mentor and previous lover, Sam Darrow, had already done that, but, like Helen, was hooked to the place, the job, the dynamic of war photography.
Following the memorable scene after the Fall of Saigon, one that is canonized in the iconic image of South Vietnamese civilians desperately trying to secure a seat on one of the last American helicopters shuttling between Saigon rooftops and US navy ships off the coast of Vietnam (ahead of the arrival of the communist North-Vietnamese troops), the story starts at the beginning of Helen's life here, back in 1965. We follow her from the her complete innocence as a new photographer and survivor in a war-torn country; through the grisly action of capturing combat scenes on film; and in the inflamed and tender scenes of romance.
If I ever were to recommend one novel on the Vietnam War, this would be it. Unless you only want battle action and an all male cast--such as MATTERHORN--I endorse this book as a poised and exquisite balance between love and war, and a love for the adrenaline-fueled action of war. As photographers, Helen, Sam, and Linh strive for the pictures that, in their individual quests, are a sort of anti-war document, an up close and personal edification of the fallout and consequences of what the US called a "skirmish." The inner conflicts of getting that award-winning shot subsumes the guilt and shame of potential exploitation and the desire to keep on following the next knell or knoll of death. What of their photography? Are they interpreters of violence? Are they, as Sam Darrow feared, making war "palatable"?
As Helen thought, "No getting around the ghoulishness of pouncing on tragedy with hungry eyes, snatching it away, glorying in its taking even among the most sympathetic `I got an incredible shot of a dead soldier/woman/child. A real tearjerker.' Afterward, film shot, they sat on the returning plane with a kind of postcoital shame, turning away from each other."
As a personal story, Soli beautifully braided, twisted, and integrated the photojournalists' addiction to war and their desperate kinds of love or lust, the difficult choices and bonds that form, bonds that may never work anywhere else but in the midst of battle scarred endurance. This is one of my favorite contemporary novels of all time. By the end of this visceral, emotionally electrifying novel, I forgot all thoughts of return to the real world. I wanted to stay with these characters. I was a lotus eater.
February 9, 2012
I can't say that I enjoyed reading this book, but I'm glad I did. I was a teenager and young adult during the Vietnam war, so it made little impact on me other than dominating the nightly news and the anti-war demonstrations all over the country. This book explained so many things about that time, and the sheer waste of so many men and resources. The characters seemed true and the plot, revolving around the 3 main people, Lhin, Helen and Darrow, made the history come alive. The Vietnamese people and their country were treated with respect by the author. What a stupid, stupid war.
May 14, 2010
3 1/2 stars.
All they now wanted was to stay where they were with the Lotus-eaters, to browse on the lotus, and to forget all thoughts of return.
Homer, The Odyssey as quoted in The Lotus Eaters.
In chapter one, photojournalist Helen Adams is preparing to leave Vietnam during the 1975 evacuation. Chapter two starts in 1963 with Linh, a former Vietnamese soldier, now an assistant to photojournalist Darrow. Both eventually meet Helen and become her friends, her life, and Vietnam becomes her home in ways she never expected. This story tells about those years between.
I didn't like chapter one at all. By chapter two, I was getting interested in the story but it took quite awhile for me to get really caught up in it. There are horrid descriptions of war but they didn't seem gratuitous. In fact, in some cases, despite the descriptions, I didn't feel the connection that I expected. Romance plays a significant role, but the story isn't just about romance. As a female photojournalist in a war zone, Helen has it both rougher and easier than her male counterparts. The characters make unexpected and sometimes very unwise decisions.
To me, the most interesting character is Linh, who is ambivalent about his role in the war, about his country.
“Once there was a soldier named Linh who did not want to go back to war.”
“My war has been going on for nine years so far. I can't take a vacation from it and go home and come back. The war is in my home.”
The book is well written but I didn't love it as much as I expected to. There are parts that are wonderful and parts that fall flat. A minor annoyance is the use of acronyms without explanation. I knew some but not all of them, and trying to figure them out took away from the flow of the story. Without giving specifics, the ending didn't ring true for me. Still, it was a good read.
This review is based on the ARC edition of the book.
Thank you, Tara!
All they now wanted was to stay where they were with the Lotus-eaters, to browse on the lotus, and to forget all thoughts of return.
Homer, The Odyssey as quoted in The Lotus Eaters.
In chapter one, photojournalist Helen Adams is preparing to leave Vietnam during the 1975 evacuation. Chapter two starts in 1963 with Linh, a former Vietnamese soldier, now an assistant to photojournalist Darrow. Both eventually meet Helen and become her friends, her life, and Vietnam becomes her home in ways she never expected. This story tells about those years between.
I didn't like chapter one at all. By chapter two, I was getting interested in the story but it took quite awhile for me to get really caught up in it. There are horrid descriptions of war but they didn't seem gratuitous. In fact, in some cases, despite the descriptions, I didn't feel the connection that I expected. Romance plays a significant role, but the story isn't just about romance. As a female photojournalist in a war zone, Helen has it both rougher and easier than her male counterparts. The characters make unexpected and sometimes very unwise decisions.
To me, the most interesting character is Linh, who is ambivalent about his role in the war, about his country.
“Once there was a soldier named Linh who did not want to go back to war.”
“My war has been going on for nine years so far. I can't take a vacation from it and go home and come back. The war is in my home.”
The book is well written but I didn't love it as much as I expected to. There are parts that are wonderful and parts that fall flat. A minor annoyance is the use of acronyms without explanation. I knew some but not all of them, and trying to figure them out took away from the flow of the story. Without giving specifics, the ending didn't ring true for me. Still, it was a good read.
This review is based on the ARC edition of the book.
Thank you, Tara!
August 2, 2013
Wow, what a captivating read. Generally I'm not inclined to read wartime novels, however I was visually drawn to the book by the cover and the interesting title was the final temptation, enticing me to crack open the pages. After the first couple of chapters I was hooked.
Helen Adams is an American photojournalist in war-torn Vietnam and through the lens of a camera she captures the violence and horrors of war, burned villages and mangled and charred bodies. However, amidst the tragedy Helen finds herself falling in love with the country itself, the rich jungles and lush landscapes.
I found myself fascinated by what draws a person to leave their homeland to go to a country ravaged by war. As I discovered in the novel, for some the war was a backdrop for adventure, driven by dreams of winning a Pulitzer or becoming a hero. For others, the reasons were nobler.
And then there is the matter of truth versus deception and misrepresentation. Through the camera lens, Soli depicts how reality can become distorted and evidence blurred and how a photo does not always speak the truth. On the other hand a photo can capture glimmers of compassion and humanity as depicted in an award winning shot where Helen captures a guard's fingers passing through a fence, placing a Lifesaver directly on a girl's tongue. For me this scene was powerful, one I won't forget anytime soon.
Rich imagery and unforgettable characters make this a compelling and highly recommended read. And for those romantics out there, the novel also contains a good love story.
Helen Adams is an American photojournalist in war-torn Vietnam and through the lens of a camera she captures the violence and horrors of war, burned villages and mangled and charred bodies. However, amidst the tragedy Helen finds herself falling in love with the country itself, the rich jungles and lush landscapes.
I found myself fascinated by what draws a person to leave their homeland to go to a country ravaged by war. As I discovered in the novel, for some the war was a backdrop for adventure, driven by dreams of winning a Pulitzer or becoming a hero. For others, the reasons were nobler.
And then there is the matter of truth versus deception and misrepresentation. Through the camera lens, Soli depicts how reality can become distorted and evidence blurred and how a photo does not always speak the truth. On the other hand a photo can capture glimmers of compassion and humanity as depicted in an award winning shot where Helen captures a guard's fingers passing through a fence, placing a Lifesaver directly on a girl's tongue. For me this scene was powerful, one I won't forget anytime soon.
Rich imagery and unforgettable characters make this a compelling and highly recommended read. And for those romantics out there, the novel also contains a good love story.
July 4, 2013
I have very mixed feelings about this novel. A lot of good things here -- not least, a central character who is a photojournalist and a woman, in Vietnam during the American war years there. At some points, the writing made me feel like I was there -- not in the Vietnam I know only a little, from a few weeks of travel, but in that Vietnam my child-mind imagined when the war was on TV and the cover of Life magazine.
The other side of my experience while reading was a sense of doubt. So many things just did not ring true. Sometimes on a single page, some things seemed very genuine while others seemed contrived. I found myself thinking, "This writer has never worked as a photojournalist," or, "This writer has not been under fire in a war zone." Not that I have -- I have not -- but those were my reactions. On other pages, I felt myself sweating in the jungle, itching, grimy, pressed down by the heavy humid air. So I felt myself sliding back and forth, in the world of the novel and then out of it again.
While I liked the characters of Darrow, a 40-something hardened American war photographer, and Linh, a Vietnamese former soldier and now Darrow's assistant, later a photographer in his own right, I didn't really warm up to the love stories that play such a big part in the narrative. I would have liked Helen to be above all that, more driven, more focused on her ambitions. It just seemed so girly of her to fall in with the hotdog older man, legendary journalist, veteran of many other wars. Feh, give me a break. The nicest part about Helen's evolving relationship with Linh is that it gradually unveils more Vietnamese culture and taste to the reader. I didn't always buy into Linh's character 100 percent -- poet and playwright, okay, he's sensitive, but still, he's a mature man in the middle of a war, and I'm just not sure I can believe in his epic feelings for Helen.
Some of the best scenes are when Helen witnesses unspeakable combat violence. These came off well, I think, because Helen is a photojournalist, not a combatant, so the degree of detachment works on the side of believability.
So I think I can recommend this book, with caveats, but I'm somewhat surprised at all the accolades it has accrued. It has a fair number of flaws.
The other side of my experience while reading was a sense of doubt. So many things just did not ring true. Sometimes on a single page, some things seemed very genuine while others seemed contrived. I found myself thinking, "This writer has never worked as a photojournalist," or, "This writer has not been under fire in a war zone." Not that I have -- I have not -- but those were my reactions. On other pages, I felt myself sweating in the jungle, itching, grimy, pressed down by the heavy humid air. So I felt myself sliding back and forth, in the world of the novel and then out of it again.
While I liked the characters of Darrow, a 40-something hardened American war photographer, and Linh, a Vietnamese former soldier and now Darrow's assistant, later a photographer in his own right, I didn't really warm up to the love stories that play such a big part in the narrative. I would have liked Helen to be above all that, more driven, more focused on her ambitions. It just seemed so girly of her to fall in with the hotdog older man, legendary journalist, veteran of many other wars. Feh, give me a break. The nicest part about Helen's evolving relationship with Linh is that it gradually unveils more Vietnamese culture and taste to the reader. I didn't always buy into Linh's character 100 percent -- poet and playwright, okay, he's sensitive, but still, he's a mature man in the middle of a war, and I'm just not sure I can believe in his epic feelings for Helen.
Some of the best scenes are when Helen witnesses unspeakable combat violence. These came off well, I think, because Helen is a photojournalist, not a combatant, so the degree of detachment works on the side of believability.
So I think I can recommend this book, with caveats, but I'm somewhat surprised at all the accolades it has accrued. It has a fair number of flaws.
June 1, 2010
Tatjani Soli’s The Lotus Eaters is a stunning debut novel set in the Vietnam War. Helen Adams drops out of college and makes her way to Saigon, hoping to witness history in the making. She learns the trade of combat photographer from Sam Darrow, a veteran journalist who becomes her lover. Helen conquers her fears, survives combat, and masters the art of distilling a relentless human tragedy down into single images. Like many of the soldiers she documents, Helen is sent home wounded, only to find that there’s no longer any place for her stateside. Back in Vietnam for a second time, Helen falls in love with Linh: a mysterious cross between photojournalist, soldier, and spy—a man tragically tugged at by the foreign and domestic forces tearing his country apart.
Tatjana Soli has created an epic war novel, with an ambitious scope that spans years, characters, and countries. Her book belongs among the highest tier of the Vietnam canon. Here, Vietnam is more than a war. We see urbanites and expats in Saigon, farmers and fishermen in small villages, the Killing Fields of Cambodia, journalists with a range of motives, as well as protesters and grieving parents in the States.
With a strong woman behind the lens and under fire, Soli has uniquely bridged the gap between the soldiers in the field and the observers around the dining room table. The book is at once a tremendous document of a telling era and a timeless story of love and aspiration. The Lotus Eaters isn’t just about how we fight wars; it’s about how we live with them, how we watch them, and how we turn them into history.
Tatjana Soli has created an epic war novel, with an ambitious scope that spans years, characters, and countries. Her book belongs among the highest tier of the Vietnam canon. Here, Vietnam is more than a war. We see urbanites and expats in Saigon, farmers and fishermen in small villages, the Killing Fields of Cambodia, journalists with a range of motives, as well as protesters and grieving parents in the States.
With a strong woman behind the lens and under fire, Soli has uniquely bridged the gap between the soldiers in the field and the observers around the dining room table. The book is at once a tremendous document of a telling era and a timeless story of love and aspiration. The Lotus Eaters isn’t just about how we fight wars; it’s about how we live with them, how we watch them, and how we turn them into history.
July 9, 2013
A most remarkable novel. The settings are lush and tropical, and elicit what Vietnam and Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh) must have been like during those years of occupation.
There are three main characters, all photojournalists – but the story is very event driven. There is tension throughout - it is like a knot being pulled tighter and tighter – a war is going after all. It’s really an explosive book with unforeseen episodes that jar us. There is an attention to minute details wheeling us closer and closer to the scenes depicted. The settings are exquisite, like paintings, but they are there for the fulsomeness of the story – not as an added extravagance.
The characters, much like the war, had no exit strategy – they become immersed and drawn into the war’s addictiveness.
The novel is very rounded with a cohesive ending. This is a great novel on a very sad war. The paperback version has an interesting commentary from the author at the end.
There are three main characters, all photojournalists – but the story is very event driven. There is tension throughout - it is like a knot being pulled tighter and tighter – a war is going after all. It’s really an explosive book with unforeseen episodes that jar us. There is an attention to minute details wheeling us closer and closer to the scenes depicted. The settings are exquisite, like paintings, but they are there for the fulsomeness of the story – not as an added extravagance.
The characters, much like the war, had no exit strategy – they become immersed and drawn into the war’s addictiveness.
The novel is very rounded with a cohesive ending. This is a great novel on a very sad war. The paperback version has an interesting commentary from the author at the end.
September 11, 2020
This is one of those books where you stop your own life in order to read it.
Focusing on a woman who is a photo journalist during the Vietnamese war it pulls you into the country, the war, the people and the times. Brilliant prose, some almost poetic. Violent prose you can barely bring yourself to read. Passionate love and unbearable loss and redemption and sorrow and confusion.
You must must must read this.
It will swim about in my head forever.
Focusing on a woman who is a photo journalist during the Vietnamese war it pulls you into the country, the war, the people and the times. Brilliant prose, some almost poetic. Violent prose you can barely bring yourself to read. Passionate love and unbearable loss and redemption and sorrow and confusion.
You must must must read this.
It will swim about in my head forever.
January 16, 2022
Generally when I have a mistaken idea of what a book is about it will mean a substantial mark down for the book, however this was not the case for Tatjana Soli's The Lotus Eaters. It was tagged as a romance and its Goodreads blurb states, Helen, the protagonist "finds herself torn between the love of two men." I dislike stories of love triangles and that explains part of the reason it languished on my tbr for eight years.
My other misapprehension was that it was a light, fluffy beach read and I am glad to say that is far from the truth. The Lotus Eaters is a painstakingly researched book about Helen, a photojournalist in Vietnam during the war. Soli spent ten years writing the book and it shows.
Research is not the only tool which Soli has at her disposal, she crafted a book with beautiful prose, an intricate plot and multi-faceted characters. Her characters are not good and shining heroes neither are they villains, they are complex and yet understandable.
I've read a fair number of books about the Vietnam war and this book rates with the best of them.
My other misapprehension was that it was a light, fluffy beach read and I am glad to say that is far from the truth. The Lotus Eaters is a painstakingly researched book about Helen, a photojournalist in Vietnam during the war. Soli spent ten years writing the book and it shows.
Research is not the only tool which Soli has at her disposal, she crafted a book with beautiful prose, an intricate plot and multi-faceted characters. Her characters are not good and shining heroes neither are they villains, they are complex and yet understandable.
I've read a fair number of books about the Vietnam war and this book rates with the best of them.
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