Book Review: The Lotus Eaters by Tatjana Soli

The Lotus Eaters at Amazon.com by Tatjana Soli's Official Site sketches the Vietnam War from the perspective of a female American photographer. Helen Adams lands in Saigon with as much experience shooting a SLR camera as someone born in the 1920s. She's novice, but determined. Her brother died in the fields of the Vietnam battles and she yearns to learn more about his death, his part in the war. Her quest lasts ten years, terminating where the book begins and ends with the Fall of Saigon in 1975.

 

Helen is a female character most women can empathize with at one point in her life. She’s a character that admires the men in her life. She shares her dad and brother’s curiosity for war and humanity. Yet, she’s excluded from standing on the same hill in combat with her father and her brother because of her gender. Be it war, sports or boardrooms, there’s a male camaraderie that women are often subtly and sometimes blatantly excluded from. A closeted ripple of belief that women may not be strong enough to endure what men endure quietly exists despite women’s suffrage and liberation.

 

Helen confronts the chivalrous myth with the click of a camera lens. She jumps on a plane to Saigon with no job and little experience with a camera and talks her way into a male-dominated field as a war photographer. Throughout the story, she balances her femininity as a sexual woman with her toughness as a photo journalist. Soli portrays Helen as a modern woman who doesn't apologize for her curiosity, strength, or need to wear a bra.

 

Running parallel to Helen’s strength is a susurrus commentary on the grayness of America’s military efforts on foreign soils. Soli leverages the character Linh to weave a tapestry depicting the truth behind most military interventions – money and political power. The public relations message shouts and sings the humanitarian cause, a message that resonates well in polls and allows voters to sleep well thinking that they are supporting their kin around the globe. Interventions are rarely executed where the land is poor or the latitude and longitude do not equate to a strong location for a military base.

 

Linh fights on three sides of the war – SVA, NVA, and US. He enlists first with the North and then the South. Once Linh’s wife is killed, he abandons military life and becomes a photographer's assistant for a US photojournalist named Sam Darrow, fighting for the US through documenting the war’s atrocities. Linh’s consumption of the ideals promoted by each side of the war erodes as the war plods over the beauty and people of his homeland. He is a citizen caught between dominant powers, wishing only for his culture and his country to be restored to peace and prosperity. How many Linhs fill the streets and homes of Afghanistan? Hushed civilians staked in the Goliaths’ crossfire.

 

Soli’s descriptions of Vietnam’s people and landscapes piqued my curiosity about Vietnam. The Indochina peninsula country is now on my “must-visit” list.