Jill's Reviews > The Lotus Eaters

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.