"... 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 some 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 them." - Homer, The Odyssey
The lotus flowers of literature take all who consume them off course, halt their travels and leave them in a perpetual and pleasantly stoned state. Sometimes the consumer is not aware of the full effect of the influence like in The Odyssey where the men are dragged back to their boat weeping for their loss without fully understanding what they mourn. In other works, the visitors seem to have some vague awareness of what has happened to them but elect to stay put like in Tennyson's "The Lotus Eaters."
They sat them down upon the yellow sand,
Between the sun and moon upon the shore;
And sweet it was to dream of Fatherland,
Of child, and wife, and slave; but evermore
Most weary seem’d the sea, weary the oar,
Weary the wandering fields of barren foam.
Then some one said, “We will return no more;”
And all at once they sang, “Our island home
Is far beyond the wave; we will no longer roam.”
Leopold Bloom wanders the streets in Ulysses in "a mood of drugged surrender to the impression of the moment," his own impressions, and then becomes lost in the scents of the shop where he seeks a diversion from a greater purpose. And in The Lightning Thief (yes, it is a children's book), young Percy Jackson is roused from his altered state at The Lotus Lounge by a call back to duty from the gods. There are certainly many more examples of interpretations of the Lotus-eaters story, but what they all have in common is an escape from an assigned path.
In The Lotus Eaters by Tatjana Soli, Helen Adams is a photojournalist who came to Vietnam in order to better understand her brother and his death in the war, but ends up staying ten years, unable to tear herself away from the violence to which she becomes increasingly desensitized. We meet her at the very end of the war as she compulsively collects images of the atrocities occurring around her. With a loaded camera in her hands that serves as a physical barrier between herself and the unspeakable. The forward trajectory of the violence stopped by the capture of the camera. In an effort to produce images that will be viewed by others at least another step or more removed from the realities of the end of the Vietnam War.
She is numb as one can imagine Homer's lotus eaters are, adrift from any home, any place either personal or professional. But she is also consummately aware of the choices she is making. Complete with love triangle, the enlarged violence of war, the role of a woman in a male-dominated profession, this novel could have been reduced to cliches but Soli's simple and direct prose delivers such consistent voice for her characters, voices without unnecessary drama or a need to shock that can characterize some war novels, that this story becomes all the more moving and disturbing because of its quiet nature.
At the end, I was left feeling that Helen's character had not so much diverged from an assigned path as created a new one for herself that arises from the war experience. It may be solitary and disturbing and unorthodox but it fits the experiences of the woman. A fine read that left me feeling a little empty myself. A little sad.
This book was read for a TLC Book Tour. Other reviews are linked from this page.