Author Guest Post: Tatjana Soli

The Second First Novel

Readers can be forgiven for believing that books are published easily, that authors take a grand view of the world around them, choose a subject — mix and bake — and two years later a beautiful new book appears. The reality, like life, is always much messier and more complicated.

I’d devoted a good six years off-and-on to writing my first novel, The Lotus Eaters, about a photojournalist in Vietnam. The book had been roundly rejected, and my agent told me none too gently (he’s of the tough-love school) that I needed to move on and write something new. I was in mourning. The first lines in The Forgetting Tree are Octavio’s, but to a much lesser extent my own feelings of loss at the time were mirrored in his.

But he also was in mourning for the missing boy. Did they not see?

What I did during this difficult period in my life is the same thing I do almost every day when home — take long walks in the regional park where I live. When I first moved to this area in Southern California, one could walk through orange, avocado, and eucalyptus groves and rarely run into another person. It was incredibly beautiful and peaceful except that over the years it began to change. A eucalyptus grove on top of a hill where we used to picnic is now a gated, luxury development where we can no longer walk. The flat, sandy bed where my puppy loved to run is now paved road. One of the most painful sights that I can remember was driving past bulldozers tearing out orange trees. This scene found its way into the book:

Each tree was an individual, with a personality, and this treatment seemed a desecration of nature. When the trees were dead… bulldozers came and tore their roots from the earth, piling them into big heap from where they were trucked away to be shredded for compost.

One of my favorite writers, J.M. Coetzee, writes, “To imagine the unimaginable” is the writer’s duty. Novels grow from complex root systems. I don’t know what the turning point was, but during those walks in the groves the story of the Baumsarg ranch, and the struggle of its owner, Claire, against the dark forces that confronted her began to form in my mind. Hers was a family torn apart by tragedy and time. The crown jewel, though, was Minna, who appeared to me like the Indian god Shiva, both creator and destroyer, concealer and revealer, ultimately unknowable. At this stage these were all simply pieces that would take months to put together into a story, but they captured my imagination.

The tree had not resurrected — rather, its life was simply hidden to the eye, beating deep in the soil, trembling within the roots hairs, in sap, wood, and bark.

So I wrote my “second” first novel not with the idea of an audience, or the idea of it being published, but because the story burned inside me, and the writing of it was the thing that fulfilled me as a writer. As I finished a first draft of this book about Claire and her search for redemption, I got the surprise call of my life that my first novel had sold. Was I ecstatic? Of course. But I had already proved to myself that even during the most fallow times, story could appear mysteriously. What made one a writer ultimately was the daily laying of those words on the page.

Tatjana Soli is a novelist and short story writer. Her bestselling debut novel, THE LOTUS EATERS, winner of the James Tait Black Prize, was a New York Times Notable Book, and finalist for the LA Times Book Award, among other honors. Visit her website, http://www.tatjanasoli.com/index.html to learn more about her two novels.

Thanks so much to Tatjana for stopping by In The Next Room again!  A review of her debut novel, The Lotus Eaters, can be found on In The Next Room here. Her guest post on Writing Near History can be found here. A review of her second novel, The Forgetting Tree, can be found on In The Next Room here.

The Forgetting Tree by Tatjana Soli

While I enjoyed The Forgetting Tree from page one, it is the second half of the book that I fell in love with. It is the kind of novel with a quiet start and a powerful finish.

Soli's second novel, the followup to one of my favourite books of last year The Lotus Eaters was a shock to me because I did not expect a writer who clearly puts so much thought into both research and writing to be able to publish another book so quickly. But somehow, Soli managed. The Forgetting Tree is the story of Claire, a woman diagnosed with cancer and clinging to the citrus ranch where she raised her family, and Minna, the young caregiver with a mysterious back story who may be either the worst, or the best, thing that could possibly happen to Claire.

Minna is really the controversial part of The Forgetting Tree, as much as I hated her at times, I couldn't help sympathizing with her, and recognizing that despite all the awful she was doing she still might be able to save Claire. It was an emotionally conflicting dilemma, and one that left me ultimately unsure about the definitions I wanted to give the characters. Nobody in this novel is all good or all bad. Claire might love her children, but that doesn't mean she's been a good mother. These sorts of complicated feelings are what Soli captures so well. The only unfortunate part is that it took a decent chunk of the novel for them to really come alive.

The beginning of The Forgetting Tree is beautifully written, but ultimately it is back story, not its heart. That doesn't happen until Minna arrives.

Just like Soli brought Vietnam in 1975 to life in The Lotus Eaters, California ranch life comes alive in The Forgetting Tree. Her books are clearly impeccably researched, and she has the amazing of giving enough details to truly make the reader feel like they are there, without boring them in the minutiae. I have to admit that I still prefer Soli's first novel, but the fact that her second was less consistent in its genius does not at all deter me from picking up whatever she publishes next.

Ultimately, this is a beautifully written book that is both moving, and a touch spooky. Although The Forgetting Tree had a slow start, Soli has told a complicated and powerful story that challenges the reader, and I continue to be a huge fan of her writing. I can only hope she continues to be so prolific and that another book will arrive in 2014.

Release Date: September 4th 2012  Pages: 416  Format: ARC
Source: TLC Book Tours  Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Also By This Author: The Lotus Eaters  Buy It: Book Depository

Author Guest Post: Tatjana Soli

Writing Near-History

When my novel, The Lotus Eaters, first came out, a reviewer identified it as the Vietnam novel with the bibliography at the back. Forty years after the fall of Saigon, it is still a bit of a shock to consider a period that so many remember as their youth now referred to as history. I was a young child at the end of the sixties, living on a military base. Although I certainly didn’t understand the war, it became an obsession into my adult life. I do not at all consider myself a historical writer, so when the idea first came to me to write about the war from the perspective of a female combat photojournalist, the prospect was terrifying. I tried to push the idea away. There are masterful accounts of the war by soldiers. In my opinion, no one will ever come close to Tim O’Brien’s books on the war. But the story that kept nagging at me was a very different one — one that almost required the kind of distance from the events that I had.

When I finally decided to go ahead with the project, I tried to be very clear in my goals. I felt an enormous obligation to get the facts right, and beyond that, to get the intangibles of the time correct. Otherwise, that precious “suspension of disbelief” would not happen for the many readers who had their own experiences to compare with. There was also the need to show the truth of the war to those with no experience of it, those not even born yet. Not only the American military side of the war, but the war from the perspective of the Vietnamese. What was the country like before Americans came? An additional question was how do journalists deal with war coverage compared to the soldiers fighting the war. It probably won’t be surprising to learn that I spent more than a year and a half digging into all these areas.

In any war novel, the war itself becomes a character, an active force in the lives of the people who must live and struggle through it. We all know how the war ended — the indelible images of the helicopters withdrawing Americans from rooftops in Saigon — and I felt that it would be coy to not acknowledge that end. This is a storyteller’s decision, not a historian’s. My focus was not on what happened, but why. The question became how to reconcile that ending with the casual beginnings in the late 50’s, early 60’s, when no one could imagine what the war would turn into. It required a diving into research, putting myself in the mindset of my characters during that time, sure that there was no other possible outcome than American victory.

That year-plus of research was spent with non-fiction accounts of the war by historians, soldiers, and journalists. I read extensively about the history of colonialism in Vietnam. Almost a hundred years of French domination that the Vietnamese finally threw off. Would they likely accept Americans or trust our motives? I read first-hand accounts by Vietnamese workers (read slaves) who worked at the Michelin rubber plantation under the French and suffered horrific abuse and exploitation. Those are the people whose descendants were able to live for months at a time underground, in the tunnels of Chu Chi.

Most of my research never made it into the book: I studied the weapons, supplies (I even got a field survival manual and C-rations. No, I did NOT eat them!). Vietnamese poetry, American rock music, classical Vietnamese music, Vietnamese food, and the oh-so-difficult tonal language where the wrong emphasis can be disastrous. I spent many days wandering Westminster (Little Saigon), near where I live. I heard stories and watched. The older generation all came around 1975. The place shares, along with most ex-pat communities around the world, a suspended sense of time. I never felt any of these experiences were wasted time for me as the creator of this very specific world. Instead, they fed my imagination and fueled the years of writing it would take to finish the book.

Although I had been to other parts of Southeast Asia, I had not been to Vietnam as part of my research. Time and money issues, but also the fact that I was concentrating on the setting of wartime, of combat. By the time I had been writing the book five years, I became superstitious that the world I had created might become unavailable to me if I were to add modern Vietnam to the mix. This last December my husband and I finally went. A magical experience, but I do not believe it would have altered anything in the novel. It was very much a trip of closure. Right now, getting ready to revise my second novel, I am again writing short stories set in Vietnam — but, big change, they are all set in modern Vietnam. The past of the American war that I lived in my head for so long, inexplicably, has receded.

Everything I’ve described so far was only the first step of the process. Research, as involving and illuminating as it is, does not make a book. It is merely the foundation. Now I had to actually write a story to go inside this world.

Tatjana Soli is a novelist and short story writer. Born in Salzburg, Austria, she attended Stanford University and the Warren Wilson MFA Program. She lives with her husband in Orange County, California, and teaches through the Gotham Writers’ Workshop.

A review of her debut novel The Lotus Eaters can be found on In The Next Room here. 

The Lotus Eaters by Tatjana Soli

"It remained the one image etched in her mind, perhaps because she did not have the film to refer back to. Once a picture was taken, the experience was purged of its power to haunt."

The Lotus Eaters by Tatjana Soli is the story of American combat photographer, Helen Adams, which takes place during the Vietnam War. The novel begins in 1975 with Saigon about to fall, as Helen and her lover Linh makes their way to way to safety. Linh is gravely injured and as they try to leave the city Helen holds onto her case of film, each photograph like a piece of herself. The Lotus Eaters floats back in time to when Helen first arrived in Vietnam, wanting to find some meaning or explanation after her brother was killed there. Instead Helen found Sam Darrow, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer who keeps chasing after a slightly more dangerous shot, and she falls in love with both the man and his dangerous ways. Linh is Darrow's assistant, and beneath his silence and loyalty he harbours many secrets including his feelings for Helen.

At first glance, The Lotus Eaters seems like a conflicted love story and although Soli uses the men in Helen's life as a springboard for her novel, the fact is that it is so much more. Although the story itself is interesting especially considering the amount of research that must have gone into writing it, as well as the fact that it's told from a unique perspective- that of a photojournalist- which I have never read before, it is the writing of the novel which makes it so remarkable. Soli's imagery is graphic and haunting, she uses just the right amount to capture the reader's attention without overwhelming them, focusing on the vibrant details of the world. Her writing has an easy flow and lyrical melody to it as one sentence slides delicately into the next:

"This was the way one lost one’s homeland. The first things lost were the sights, then the smells. Touch disappeared, and, of course, taste was quick to follow. Even the sounds of one’s own language, in a foreign place, evoked only nostalgia."

The title of the novel also perfectly captures the core message. The Lotus Eaters refers to Homer's Odyssey where people ate lotus fruits on an island and fell into a peaceful sleepy apathy, never to return home. Similarly, once Helen gets a taste of Vietnam, she is unable to leave. Although The Lotus Eaters is not perfect- for example, there is quite a large chunk of time skipped about how exactly Helen and Linh pass the years which felt missing and incomplete- it is so incredibly beautiful that any flaws the reader may find can be easily forgiven. Although The Lotus Eaters may initially appeal to those already interested in the time period, as somebody who had never read about the Vietnam War before I was expertly drawn into the a different country and time. The novel is full of beautiful specifics, but what makes it so wonderful is that the larger themes like looking for love and trying to find where your home is, are completely universal. With The Lotus Eaters Tatjana Soli has written a debut which any reader should be compelled to pick up as they will effortlessly fall into the world Soli has created where the fictional and the real become blurred with complete beauty.

Release Date: March 30th 2010
Pages: 384
Overall: 5/5
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This review was a part of TLC Book Tours. Click here to read what other tour hosts thought. For the purpose of this review I was provided with a copy of the book which did not require a positive review. The opinions expressed in this post are completely my own.