Book Review: The Lotus Eaters by Tatjana Soli

The Lotus Eaters by Tatjana Soli

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

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 seem 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 war mixes 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.

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Emptying Tomorrow

What’s said in the marriage, stays in the marriage. Mostly because age is kind and I can’t remember the petty comments we’ve flung at each other over 21 years. The loving comments are said often enough they are ingrained in my heart.

But there is something Brendan said to me long ago which I will share with you: “Julie, you’re not happy unless you have something to worry about.” This resonates still because, well, it’s mostly true. I would cut the word “happy” –  worrying doesn’t make me happy. It makes me.

Let’s rewrite that sentence: “Julie, you’re not, unless you have something to worry about.” Anxiety is my fuel.

This terrific blog post about anxiety and the creative process flowed into my Twitter feed last week: Let’s Talk About Anxiety and the Creative Process. It got me to thinking about the nest of anxieties I create and where it fits into my writing life. Author Dan Blank reminds us we all bear the burden of uncertainty and our fears are relative – no more, no less than the guy in the coffee shop we are eavesdropping on. But in this up-by-the-bootstraps, My-Facebook-Life-Is-Perfect society, we are loath to name our anxieties lest they reveal the gross flaws in our character.

On the heels of Dan Blank’s blog post was an interview with comedian Marc Maron on WHYY’s Fresh Air. Maron is hilarious guy, clever and endearing. And a chronic fretter (Fretterer? Fretishist? Chronically fraught?). When asked by host Terri Gross if he related to the idea of suffering as inspiration for his creativity, Maron replied “…I have found that … I experience a tremendous amount of dread and fear and panic. I think that misery for people that incredibly anxious or frightened is something consistent. I think obsession sometimes works as almost a spirituality. You know, you have a routine that your brain kind of loops around that you call home, but that’s usually in defense of some other part of you that’s unruly. And for me, I think it’s anxiety and panic and worry and dread.” So what you’re saying, Mr. Maron, is that you are not, unless you have something to worry about. You bow at the altar of Dread. Hey, we’re a religion!

A couple of weeks ago I went out for a trail run. On uphill stretch I realized my heart was trying to leap from my throat. I stopped but could not catch my breath. This scared the shit out of me and made my heart race even faster, which made me panic more, which… A man passed me and we waved at one another. I thought it would be bad form to collapse in front of a stranger. Finally my heart slowed and my lungs opened. I hobbled back to the car, chilled and cowed by my body’s betrayal of my mind. I’d been on that same stretch only days before and bounded up the same path. I chalked it up to running on an empty stomach and tried to push away darker fears.

Early the next morning while sitting on the sofa, writing and drinking my morning joe, my heart zoomed. I could have been sitting in a cramped airplane seat in the middle of a 10-hour flight, the way the panic attack came on. Now I was scared. I know, I know, I should have called my doctor (new in town, I didn’t yet have a GP and I was one week away from a new health insurance plan taking effect. God Bless America, Land of It’s Cheaper to Die Than Visit the ER). The next day I sliced my coffee intake in half (a fun few days of withdrawal drudgery ensued) and all but eliminated alcohol. I wondered, at nearly 44, was this the start of hormone-induced perimenopause? I eat clean, I run, swim, bike, yoga – I’m fit as a fiddle. A little creaky and soft in many spots, but sheesh…

Although I couldn’t completely rule out a physical cause for my racing heart (and I do have a doctor’s appointment scheduled. In June.), I’m pretty attuned to my emotional heart. I knew all those tiny eggs in the nest of anxieties I’ve been incubating over the past several months were hatching in the warmth of spring. And some of them are full-grown birds of prey, coming home to roost. Here are my chicks and hawks, complete with ID bands so even if I set them free, we’ll keep track of each other:

Things I Worry About Constantly

• something will happen to Brendan and I will be alone
• I will contract a terminal illness (Cold comfort that I already have a terminal illness. It’s known as being born)
• I will fall victim again to depression and an Amber alert will have to be issued for my soul
• I will have another running injury and be denied the addictive substance I crave: endorphins
• I am irrelevant. This is wrapped up in the heartbreak of infertility, miscarriage and the failed attempts to adopt. I have a surplus of love that feels like it’s draining into a black hole of regret and sorrow
• Money. This is back again, after taking a few years’ hiatus. We’ve given up a lot to follow our hearts’ calling and the compromise, at least in the near future, is financial security
• I’m missing fundamental truth of my life, something that’s right in front of me. And I’m not getting any younger.

Not on this list:

• Writing

I search for it. I listen for the scratching the door. But I feel no anxiety about my writing. This is not a matter of self-confidence – I have no illusions about my skills and talents. It’s simply the one open space in my life not crowded by my fears. Perhaps more importantly, I don’t feel anxious when I write. The world slips away and I don’t feel much of anything – not my belly, my bladder, my stiff neck or aching shoulders. I feel the story.

Nor do I entertain illusions about publication, as least not through the traditional channels. I’ve released myself from that pressure and those expectations. When I finish this monster and return to writing short stories before tackling the next long-form project, I’ll hope for the same publishing success as my recent short story endeavors. I’ll do all I can to bring my novel to the shelf, but I remind myself daily that the writing process is what brings me peace and fulfillment, not the reward of extrinsic acknowledgment.

Perhaps this is the fundamental truth about my life over which I seem to lose so much sleep. And I’m not getting any younger.

But I did run that damn hill again.

bending not breaking
admiralty inlet may 2013

Our anxiety does not empty tomorrow of its sorrows, but only empties today of its strengths. Charles Spurgeon

Book Review: The Fault In Our Stars by John Green

When a book seems to be everywhere, gaining critical and commercial attention, I do my best to avoid reading reviews. I aim to remain as neutral as possible and even ignorant of the book’s premise so I can read with an unbiased mind. So it was with The Fault In Our Stars. It wasn’t until I had it home from the library, reading the jacket summary, did I know it was a young adult novel with cancer as a central cast member.

When a book touches me in a certain way, I seek out negative reviews before writing my own thoughts. I wonder if my emotional reactions have clouded my critical assessment and I look for counter opinions to balance my perspective.

I read through several less-than-enthusiastic Goodreads reviews of The Fault In Our Stars, appreciating some comments, shaking my head at others – as we do in that community. But one review and the intense debate/discussion that accompanied it troubled me greatly. The reviewer, while recognizing the quality of Green’s writing, questioned the right the author had to tell the story. Presumably because he had not lost a loved one to cancer, although the book was predicated on Green’s experiences as a chaplain at a children’s hospital.

What troubled me about this review was the questioning of an author’s right to tell a story that he or she had not experienced directly. This is a work of fiction. This is what writers do. Of course many writers fictionalize events in their life, using their experiences as jumping off points for stories, as Green did. But the notion that a writer must restrict his storytelling to first-hand events is preposterous. Should Martin Zusack not have written The Book Thief? Should Cormac McCarthy not have written Blood Meridian? Should China Miéville not construct his steampunk fantasy worlds? Should Shakespeare not have written Hamlet? Okay, you get my point.

John Green wrote a deeply personal and very contemporary story from the first person perspective of a young woman dying of cancer. No, the author has never been a sixteen year old girl with a terminal illness. But he gave voice to her tragedy in a way that has touched thousands of readers. It’s is what we trust writers to do: to tell the stories we know, can imagine, or want to hear but do not have the ability to voice on our own.

Another criticism of this book that bugged the heck out of me was the charge that of an emotionally manipulative story. This is a young adult novel about kids dying of cancer. If there is a way to write the story that doesn’t involve intense emotions, well, it would not be a story I’d care to read. Adolescents and teenagers feel things deeply. On a scale of one to ten, they experience life at twenty. If anything, in a world of instant feedback and frighteningly short attention spans, I am grateful for a book that takes the young adult reader’s breath away, that makes them feel truly, madly, deeply.

And yet another poke at The Fault In Our Stars was the hyper-precocity of its characters. It’s true. Teenagers aren’t this articulate. In fact, no one I know, no matter how widely read and clever, speaks with the rapid-fire wit and clarity of Hazel and Gus. Then again, no one speaks like characters in a David Mamet play, or a Quentin Tarantino movie, or an Aaron Sorkin television drama. Yet we eat that shit up. Because it’s great writing and the characters knock us out. I WANT young readers to hear voices like these. Because young readers are smart. They get this dialogue, these characters. Just because they aren’t capable of spouting forth with such erudition (who amongst us is?) doesn’t mean they aren’t capable of examining and responding to life with sophisticated insight. May I remind those critics again that this is a work of fiction?

I wasn’t fully on board with the subplot of elusive and misanthropic JD Salinger-esque author and his strange book – those scenes seemed forced and stilted to me – but I would have gone just about anywhere with these characters.

A beautifully rendered tragedy with smart, funny, honorable characters whose voices are unique and strong. I can think of no greater gift to young and mature readers alike than a powerful story told with grace and feeling.

This Round’s On Me

I almost bailed. It wasn’t just the hangover. I tend to get a little manic in the early half of hangover recovery (I swear my best runs are the morning after one too many glasses of wine). But that night, it was the M. Stansfield, the Lazy Gardener and a shared carafe of sake. And the pork belly dumplings. And the kimchi.

I was up early, despite the gin. I went for a swim – endorphins being the best hair-of-the-dog I know – then home to a monster plate of poison-soaking-up pancakes. And I still had hours to sneak in lunch and perusal at Elliott Bay Books before the afternoon writing workshop at Hugo House.

It was more that I’d had a shitty two weeks of writing. I’d kept up with my early morning writing sessions, except for the two days we were out-of-town almost buying a house and then not and then leasing an apartment. And the one morning I was compelled to finish the book that had so enraptured me during a bout of raging insomnia a few hours before. Turning its final pages, I sat on the sofa clutching a gut-scorching mug of coffee and I sobbed.  Then I went to work and quit my job. Didn’t get much writing done that day. And then there was the morning after the night before, my brain too hazy with gin and kimchi to face pen and blank paper.

But really, I’ve churned out some pages. Just not as many as I’d've liked. Weekends have been distracted frenzies of packing and shopping for things that I fear I will need but won’t be able to just pop out and purchase once I leave a city of 4 million for a peninsula of 10,000. I missed my February goal of 90,000 total by… oh… 5,000 words. Or so. Not fair. It was a short month by four days. I might have made it, otherwise.

So on this day, after my swim and pancakes, after peppermint tea and Advil, I settled at my desk with several days’ worth of writing to type into my manuscript. Got the iPod queued up with hours of rainy day tunes and shut down the social media sites. My fingers flew across the keyboard. Then the pounding began. And it wasn’t in my tender head.

At first I thought the culprit was the young architect upstairs who introduced himself to our complex last Halloween by throwing a raging party (my neighbors and I don’t party. Sometimes the guy across the courtyard yells during football season) that resulted in me calling the landlord at 7 the following morning to have someone clean up the vomit on our patio spewed by a party girl from the balcony above. I’m not a fan of the guy upstairs. And he’s a stomper. A small guy who crosses his living room like Charlton Heston in a chariot pulled by water buffalo.

But it wasn’t Stomper Boy. It was coming from below the apartment. I discovered the landlord in the basement, repairing the basement ceiling, i.e. my frigging floor. For over an hour, I was subjected to hammering, drilling, thumping. Then the birds that nest in the chimney got going. Soon I was surrounded by a convention of noisemakers, all of whom were clearly aware that this was the first time in days I had sat down at the computer, knuckles cracked, primed to work. I did work, between bouts of cursing, but it wasn’t quality – it was a secretarial act, retyping my longhand without registering my intent in the words.

I considering bundling myself, laptop and notebook off to the Queen Anne branch of the SPL, where I spend most weekend afternoons. But then the hangover fatigue hit and I knew after thirty minutes wrapped in the blanket of a warm, quiet Reading Room, I’d be mush. And by the time I settled in, I’d have to turn right around and schlep across town to Capitol Hill and Hugo House to attend a workshop I’d registered for last December in a pique of writerly enthusiasm. Which was now the one hundred percent last thing I wanted to do.

So I gave a “Fuck it” and stomped out the front door.

Ah jeez.

Sometimes I just want to talk about writing. I want to hear other people talk about writing. Workshops are dandy and handy and I nearly always come away with a scrap, or a collection of scraps, that I can mine for story ideas, motivation, contemplation. But I am not a star at writing well on cue – it’s gotten easier, as I’ve mentioned before – but I’m about as skilled a spontaneous writer as I am a speaker – which means I’m better off remaining the mysterious, quiet presence in the back of the classroom. Keep ‘em guessing. Never let ‘em hear you sweat.

At some point during the afternoon, our guide and conspirator Jonathan Evison, author of the New York Times bestseller West of Here (2011), The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving (2012), and recipient of the Washington State Book Award for his debut novel All About Lulu (2008), confessed he’d been dreading this workshop for several weeks. “I’m not a teacher,” he proclaimed in the opening minutes of our hours together. “I don’t believe you can teach writing. Just ask me some questions.”

It wasn’t a workshop. It was a talkshop, a thinkshop, a laughshop. The topic was ostensibly the relationship between the writer and the reader, which is first and foremost a dialogue the writer has with herself. What is the effect I’m trying to create with the story? What do I want the reader to walk away feeling, considering, sorting out? We discussed the assumptions we must make about our readers’ intelligence.  As writers, we should “understate our expertise” by not engaging in a brain dump of research to ensure our readers get where the story is coming from and how the context informs the present action. This is critical for me to consider, as the very nature of historical fiction is fraught with sinkholes of exposition and backstory.

We talked about allowing characters free rein, to respect the direction characters take and to be prepared to “reverse engineer” the plot when the logic of the story or the logic of the characters’ character demands it. I foresee putting on my big girl pants and wading into the muck of my plot for some serious reverse engineering in drafts to come.

We chatted about tension in story arc, the dance between the logic of the characters – remaining consistent with their nature – versus “subverting the reader’s expectation” by taking the story in a direction they won’t expect, yet by the end, becomes the only direction that is true to the story.

But mostly, we just kvetched. We spilled about the business of writing, about beta readers, editors, publishers, agents and failure. We examined the trajectory of an author who wrote his first novel in 1987, at the age of 19. Many novels and lifetimes later, the first published novel appeared in 2008, when Evison was 40. Twenty-one years of scraping together enough part-time gigs to support a writing habit that now supports a family full-time. To have the opportunity to mine the brain of a hard-working writer who takes nothing for granted blew away the cost of admission.

We compared work styles – Evison is yet one more champion of the first-thing-in-the-morning, long-hand school (I remember a workshop I attended a couple of years ago when the author strongly advocated early morning writing. I still have my notes, in which I scribbled “I’m up at 4:30 to run as it is, how the hell can I get up any earlier to write?” It took me another year to admit to myself I was making excuses about not having the time or energy to write while working full-time. Two years later, I see a novel coming together that will have been written nearly entirely between 4:30-5:15 a.m., one page at a time. This shit works, people. If you can’t be there every day, aim for a minimum of 5). Evison revises as he goes, which I’m able to do with short fiction, but I fear I’d never finish if I attempted real-time revision with the novel. He writes a page a day, 320 days a year. A novel is born.

And we talked about what it is to be a writer. Which in the end has nothing to do with anything above. It is the moment you lose yourself in the story, you feel no hunger, no thirst, no pressure on your bladder. When you look up at last, you see that hours have passed. You felt only the characters acting through you; you became a conduit for the story to flow from the universe to the page. How it gets there and who eventually reads it is irrelevant to the fact that the only requirement to be a writer is to write. Jonathan Evison is correct. That can’t be taught. It can only be done.

Book Review: White Dog Fell from the Sky by Eleanor Morse

White Dog Fell from the Sky by Eleanor Morse

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

White Dog Fell from the Sky is as beautiful and profound a novel about love as any I have read. With grace and power it presents all the forms of love the heart is capable of holding: love born of compassion and of passion, love of family and of country, the blinding, feral love for one’s children, for any child, the helpless love for suffering animals, the love of justice that compels us to act, despite our fear.

The story unfolds in Botswana in the mid-1970’s. Across the border in South Africa the jaws of apartheid are grinding black citizens to bone and dust; those caught rebelling face torture and death in prison. A young medical student, Isaac Muthethe, escapes across the border in a hearse, hoping to create a new life and eventually smuggle his younger siblings into Botswana before apartheid swallows them whole. A stranger to Botswana, with no contacts or destination, Isaac begins walking. Behind him is a dog who appeared out of nowhere and who refuses to be left behind. Isaac names him White Dog and so by naming him, becomes attached to him as a symbol of survival and unconditional love.

By chance Isaac encounters an old chum, Amen, who is a member of the South African resistance movement, the ANC. Amen invites Isaac into his household. Fortuitously, Isaac is hired as a gardener by Alice Mendelssohn, an American woman in a nearby town.

Alice’s story, which begins as her marriage comes to an end, becomes linked to Isaac’s by a spark of compassion. It’s as if her heart knows its way before her head has a chance to object. She welcomes Isaac into her home with matter-of-fact generosity, while her mind is distracted by the stress of a stuttering marriage coming to a cold stall.

To put some distance between herself and her present reality, Alice leaves town on a research trip to the great veldt of Botswana – remote, removed, cut off from her town life. Alice asks Isaac to remain in her home during her absence. He is overwhelmed by her sudden trust, yet determined to be worthy of her respect. Alice is surprised to fall in sudden love with a taciturn British anthropologist, Ian Henry. She delays her return home to explore the possibility of a future with this solitary man, her senior by a generation.

When Alice returns several weeks later, Isaac has disappeared. His beloved companion, White Dog, remains behind, waiting for him, nearly dead from starvation. In the kitchen an uneaten bowl of porridge sits spoiled on the table, as if Isaac had been interrupted at his breakfast.

Isaac’s fate takes the reader into dark and terrible places; Alice’s quest to find him reveals the light of compassion and the depth of love.

In addition to love, the themes of social justice and political realities in Africa play central roles in the narrative. Man-made borders, that between Botswana and South Africa, the separation of blacks and whites, the barriers of language, social class and nationality as well as the fences designed to keep wildlife away from pasture land, create a sense of confinement and claustrophobia that is at ironic odds with the vast savanna of southern Africa.

Eleanor Morse’s prose captures the searing heat and treacherous beauty of Botswana; her characters touch every sense with a Babel of languages, revealing eyes or masked expressions, the salt on their skin, the sweat that clings to their clothes, the hair that shows or belies their ages. The tension she maintains leaves the reader raw and unable to let the book rest – the story compels as much as it shatters.

There is something very classic about Morse’s writing style. This is the work of a mature, confident writer – making me think of Margaret Atwood, Shirley Hazzard, Richard Ford, Iris Murdoch. It could have been written thirty years ago instead of last year – there is an elegance, an ease, a straightforward storytelling style that contains not the least trace of contemporary self-consciousness.

I implore you to read this beautiful book. Your soul will tremble, your heart will ache and you will be changed as a reader.

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Book Review: In the Shadow of the Banyan, Vaddey Ratner

In the Shadow of the Banyan by Vaddey Ratner

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

To render historical, political fiction in the voice and through the eyes of a young child, a writer sets herself a tremendous challenge and takes on great risk. Children are naturally fanciful, unreliable creatures – not dishonest, but only able to offer the truth as their immature brains can grasp and explain it. When the story is revealed as the author’s own, the reader feels compelled to accept a fictionalized account as mere degrees of separation from the truth.

What Vaddey Ratner has accomplished with her striking and lovely In the Shadow of the Banyan is a tone poem. Its outline is based on the atrocious Khmer Rouge regime, but the narrative floats on themes of family, mythology and the deadly beauty of the author’s homeland. The nanny of the story’s narrator, Raami – the author’s mirror character – says it best when she declares that stories “are like footpaths of the gods. They lead us back and forth across time and space and connect us to the entire universe.”

In the Shadow of the Banyan is a story that connects us to Cambodia’s recent past and the genocide committed by the Khmer Rouge during the late 1970′s. Because we are seeing the events unfold through the eyes and within the heart of a seven-year old girl, we are twisted and wrenched by a child’s vulnerability and hope but spared the most gruesome details of torture and obliteration. In many ways this is a grace, for it allows us to focus on the child’s small world of her privileged family and their servants without being overwhelmed by the incomprehensible horror of Cambodia’s civil war. But it also renders some characters shadowy and incomplete and glosses over context that would have helped create a firmer narrative.

Although the book jacket declares the novel covers the four years of the Khmer Rouge regime, the action is heavily concentrated on the first days and weeks after the capture and exile of Raami’s family. The first half of the book is a near moment-by-moment recount of the first weeks after the Khmer Rouge declares a new state on April 17, 1975. The second half chronicles the splitting apart of Raami’s family as one relative after another is slaughtered outright or dies as a result of their enslavement. There is a reference to the second anniversary of the Revolution and to Raami’s ninth birthday. The book’s final pages mention the war between Vietnam and Cambodia and the retreating Khmer Rouge armies, so it must end in the early weeks or months of 1979. This is significant to me because I feel the details invested in the early parts are tedious at times, whereas the shifts of time and events in the latter third of the novel, as Raami ages and suffers and grows as a refugee in her own homeland, are given broad, vague brushstrokes.

Ultimately, however, it is a book I feel honored to have read. Ratner’s language is lyrical and stirring; she creates gorgeous and vivid portrait of Cambodia, filling the reader with longing to see, hear, taste, and touch a vibrant, complex land. It offers a unique perspective into a history and culture little or mis-understood in the West and I hope other readers have the same reaction as I – of wanting to know more, to read more, to hear other survivors’ stories – in an effort to understand and to humanize the newspaper headlines.

My husband, as a teacher of high school history and social studies, received a Fulbright grant and spent several weeks in Southeast Asia a few years ago. Cambodia and Vietnam, in equal measure but for different reasons, touched him to his core. Vietnam’s recent history he was, of course, more familiar; U.S. history books treat Cambodia’s chaos as a post-script to the “American” War (as the Vietnam War is known in Southeast Asia). When you begin to fully grasp a reality that is little mentioned in our own history books, it’s a horrible slap in the face – a sensation of guilt and anger that in your ignorance, you are somehow complicit. It is through the gift of authors such as Vaddey Ratner that these stories are told so we all can wake up and learn.
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Book Review: City of Women by David Gillham

City of Women by David R. Gillham

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There is neither black nor white in war, only infinite variations of gray. With the buffer of history and hindsight, we can sit at our remove and imagine how our moral compass would guide us through treacherous situations, but fiction – well-crafted fiction – can offer three-dimensional dilemma and nuance that our egos would deny.

David Gillham’s City of Women is just such a work and it is excellent. Berlin in 1943 is a city of shadows. Nearly all able-bodied men are fighting across various fronts; left behind are hungry, cowed, suspicious citizens and their Nazi keepers, the old and infirm, wounded soldiers, and black marketeers. But mostly, Berlin is kept afloat by the wives, mothers, sisters and daughters of soldiers and officers. It is a city of women.

One of these women is the lovely and enigmatic Sigrid Schröder, a stenographer and wife of a combat officer. Sigrid’s war is reduced to the daily grind of her job and the grim existence she shares with her wretched mother-in-law. Scrapping together enough to eat, making do with threadbare clothes, huddling in a bomb shelter, not attracting the attention of her apartment building’s informers or Nazis patrolling the streets, would seem to leave Sigrid with no time or energy for moral quandaries. But there are empty moments, split open by boredom, loneliness and desperation. How Sigrid fills them drives the plot of this atypical wartime thriller.

Gillham juggles many elements. His skill at maintaining a complicated narrative with many characters, while remaining true to history, is tremendous. He adds new elements to our understanding of German citizens’ attitudes and behaviors during the war while crafting the hold-your-breath suspense of a literary thriller. His portrait of Berlin is pitch-perfect – the hopelessness and the viciousness of a city living in fear are claustrophobic and terrifying.

Gillham’s characters are intriguing, sympathetic and nuanced. The moments of tenderness and betrayal leave the reader uncertain of whom to trust, demonstrating the inconsistencies and unpredictability of human behavior that are true even in the best of circumstances. In the worst of times, who among us wouldn’t do what we needed in order to survive? Who among us would risk everything to ensure the survival of others?

What holds this back from a 5-star read is the overheated atmosphere. David Gillham’s Berlin might be drab and crumbling, but beneath the patched coats and bomb rubble is a city pulsing with sex. I’m torn here, because it also raises an important question of how women survive, even now, when their political and physical power is so often compromised. Sex becomes a refuge and a weapon. Still, the movie theatre trysts and living room carpet couplings become tedious and make you wonder how Sigrid would have been portrayed by a woman writer.

In addition, this is one of the most poorly proofread books I have encountered in recent memory. That isn’t the author’s fault, but it jars the reader from her world and sends her dashing for her red pen.

A compelling novel that I highly recommend to WWII history enthusiasts and literary thriller fans alike.

View all my reviews

My Character (‘s) Flaw

Several days ago we stood on a beach, looking out across the Salish Sea, our shoulders hunched against the briny wind. Brendan turned to me and said, “Our lives are changing.”

Not so many years ago, this sentence would have been “We are changing our lives.” Hard-wired for motion, we grew restless every two or three years. We switched jobs, home loans, states, cities, countries with ease – not seeking anything better, not out of dissatisfaction for where we were or what we had – but out of a spirited curiosity, a determination to embrace adventure. And like magic, the opportunities appeared. A better-paying job offer materialized after I submitted a letter of resignation to my current employer; buyers snapped up our house before it went the market; Permanent Residency was granted when we’d hoped only for six-month work permits. It seemed that each time we decided to leap without a net, the Universe said “Go on! I got this.”

But then we landed here, in this green and gray city of whey-faced, over-caffeinated hipsters and North Face puffy-coated soccer moms and we fell in love. We fell in love with the city’s sparkling waters and downy peaks, its bookstores and beer, its endearing neighborhoods of Arts and Crafts bungalows and small-batch gourmet cupcake joints. We found fulfilling work, a cheap rental in a great neighborhood, created a community of friends and thought, “Right. We’re home, let’s set down stakes and dig in.” And dig in we did. Five years in one city is a record for our nearly-21 year union. And it felt right. Mostly. Maybe. Sort of. Not really.

Here’s my Solstice blog post. I’m all “It’s been a pretty rough year, but now the light is shining again” Zen-like reflective, thinking the year had closed and I could move on, right? I can’t reread it. I’m afraid I might cry and not get through the rest of what I want to write tonight. The thing is, in the final hours of the year that was, our settled little life shattered.

I am easily disappointed by people. Classic introvert that I am, it’s a major character flaw. But I don’t want to be that person, so I work to pull my heart out, open it and offer up bits to strangers and loved ones alike. Then something happens and all my demons snigger and shout “See? See! Just like we’ve said all along. People Suck!”

Maybe that’s why I read fiction. Make-believe characters are far more satisfying than the real things. And if they aren’t, I can toss the book aside and move on to the next. Or, if I make my way to the end, I can pound out a review, holding the author entirely responsible for the flaws in his characters.

And it’s very likely why I write fiction. But this isn’t to suggest that the fiction writer is a puppeteer stringing her characters along. When you are fully engaged in your story, writing from a place of authenticity, your characters lead you. I’ve spent six months getting to know my protagonist and just this morning did she finally tell me what she wanted. I’ve asked her since day one, knowing as any good student of writing does that all characters want something and it’s the writer’s job to put obstacles in the way of those desires – that’s what makes a plot. But there sat my protagonist with a phone cradled to her ear, listening to a friend sharing news that will allow her to make choices, and changes, to her life, to live where and  - after a fashion –  how she wants. Suddenly she’s faced with deciding what that really is. And telling me, the writer, in the process. I just had to have the patience to let her tell her story and to remain silent so I wouldn’t muck it up.

Last Saturday I participated in an extraordinary workshop, “Salon at SAM”, co-sponsored by the Seattle Art Museum and Hedgebrook, a retreat for writers on Whidbey Island. We selected a work of art from the SAM exhibit Elles: Women Artists from the Centre Pompidou, created a character based on that work and wrote a monologue in his or her voice.

I selected a short, continuously looped black and white film. The artist filmed herself on a beach, rotating a hula hoop around her hips. You couldn’t see her head, only her naked, beautiful body. And the hula hoop wasn’t what you tossed around your waist in the 4th grade. This hula hoop was made of barbed wire. It punctured and bruised the artist’s skin. The film was horrifying and brutal – a political protest that touched me in a very personal way. And it gave me a story.

We shared the experience of writing from a work of art with the large group. Then we returned in small groups to the art we’d chosen and read our monologues aloud. I wrote the dance with a hula hoop made of barbed wire as a dream my character was having, a dream that made her realize she was in a situation she wanted out of, but wasn’t able to admit the truth. In my story, my character was speaking to her husband. As my small group discussed my monologue, one woman turned to me and said “I don’t think your character is talking to her husband. I think she is talking to another woman.” I felt a rush of relief  and gratitude when I heard this. “I knew it,” I replied. “Thank you. I knew the husband part was wrong.” I hadn’t been able to think of the “what next” until my fellow writer made me realize I was directing my character, instead of allowing her to move me.

And isn’t that just what happens in life? We get so wrapped up – so busy and noisy – pushing our lives the way we think they should be going, because it’s the logical thing, it’s the expected thing, it’s what we think others will value, that we blow right past the simple truths, the clear path of “what next.”

I won’t go into what happened. Not here. Not now. It’s a story of such insanity that it would take more than a blog post to sort through. And besides, it’s far too rich for nonfiction. I’m collecting the details even as I live through the nightmare, because someday this is going to make a fucking great read. But know that our health is fine, we are loved, we have each other and for the most part, our senses of humor remain intact. With all of this, we can get through anything.

But our lives are changing. And since the Universe is watching and listening, I just want to add: We are changing our lives.

Book Review: Toby’s Room by Pat Barker

The bitter irony of war is that it defines life at the same time as it destroys. For those in uniform, following orders is the one raison d’etre when all reason has been lost in the bloodied muck of the battlefield. For those left behind, doing for the war effort becomes the channel through which fear and pride flow into the morass of uncertainty.

How does war change us? Does it redefine character? Does it halt the trajectory of our lives and set us on a different path? Does it show in stark relief who we really are, stripped bare of our defenses and pretenses?

And who are once stripped of that most central piece of our identity: our literal – flesh and bone – face?

With Toby’s Room, her follow-up to 2007’s Life Class, Pat Barker returns to England in the years just prior to World War I. The first part of Toby’s Room – set in 1912 at the country home of Toby’s and his sister Elinor’s upper-middle class family – serves as a prequel to Life Class. Its second half – set in 1917 – tells us what became of the characters and their relationships that were the central focus of Life Class. Toby’s Room can be read independently of its precursor, but it is a strong testament to the writer’s skill how seamlessly she weaves together these two books so that they seem not like prequel or sequel, but parts of a greater whole.

Barker explores many of the same themes in Toby’s Room – the intersection of art and war, the brutality of the WWI battlefields and trenches, the emotional defenses people create to survive the worst of times. But Toby’s Room is darker, richer and crueler than Life Class. It shows us that not even the greatest heroism and courage can change the face of shame.

There is an element of mystery in Toby’s Room, as Elinor obsesses over the “Missing, Believed Killed” telegram her family receives in 1917. Her search for the truth of her brother’s disappearance in France defines the narrative’s plot. Elinor manages this intrigue while turning her back on any involvement in the war, willfully denying the effect it has had on her life, her love affairs and her family. She tries to lose herself in her art, but eventually it is her art that draws her directly into the war effort.

Pat Barker brings to life the fascinating intersection of war, art and science during World War I, intermingling historical characters and institutions with her fictional narrative to show how artists aided in surgical reconstruction of soldiers’ faces disfigured by bullets, bombs and shrapnel. I spent some time looking through the Tonks’ portraits at The Gillies Archives – the creation and use of which is also a central theme of Toby’s Room. The portraits of faces destroyed by war and reconstructed with the medical technology available at the time are devastating. Barker gives these forgotten men voices, faces and souls.

Her writing style is restrained and distant, almost cold at times. The tone fits the characters and their social class and mirrors the walls they have erected around their hearts. And it makes the brutality of the story all the more shocking.

The Light That I Have: Reflections On A Winter Solstice

Storm clouds over Elliott Bay, Seattle

You wouldn’t know looking around our small apartment that Christmas is but a few sleeps away. We’ve forgone our annual wet and windy visit to the Boy Scout Troop 100 Christmas Tree lot at St. Alphonsus Church across the street from Ballard Market. Although the stack of holiday greetings grows daily, the cards and letters remain unopened, as do the boxes of cards I bought for our own missives. I won’t be watering poinsettias well into March because neither red nor white bloom graces our table. I can hardly be bothered to light even a candle.

We’ve decided to keep our heads down and plow through the rest of this year without celebration. Maybe we fear attracting any more attention from higher powers that seemed to hold the screw to us during 2012. Maybe we’re just weary. Maybe celebration right now feels wrong.

But I can’t stop myself from yearning for light, from reaching for the promise of renewal that the Solstice offers. It is not Christmas that holds my wonder and feeds my anticipation. I absolved December 25th of unreasonable expectations and spiritual significance some years ago. I just like the lights on the tree.

It is this ancient tradition of honoring evergreens and the burning of bright light in the darkest days that allows me to find solace in the Solstice. I think upon this day as the year’s end, the time to pause and reflect as the seasons shift and the earth stutters, then marches resolutely toward Spring.

This was a year when light and dark were in constant flow, when the weight of deepest sorrow was counter-balanced by the relief of joy. Yet I come to the Solstice feeling smaller somehow, a bit shrunken and defeated by the 365 days that have passed since the night last receded, then grew full again. I watched as a loved one received the death sentence of a terrible, prolonged disease. A few weeks later life inside me stilled once again, even as I imagined names and hair color, tiny hands to hold and a little voice calling after me. I’ve had to stand idly to one side, fists clenched, heart pounding in rage, as the person I adore and respect most in the world agonizes over present and future and what little control he has over each seemingly stolen away. I’ve looked in the mirror at a body that seems hell-bent on thwarting every good thing I try to do for it, forcing me twice under a surgeon’s knife and taking away in recent weeks the one thing that brought me endorphin-surging physical release. I’ve had to accept that many of those who’ve known me the longest are the least interested in discovering who I have become. And then, in the last days of this year, my voice joined the chorus of rage and grief as a stunned nation absorbed, helplessly, the news of the slaughter in Newtown.

And yet.

And yet there is light. There is laughter. There is deep happiness and certain peace. There is the celebration of twenty years of marriage – defying odds set against two very young people who knew one other five months before vowing to spend a lifetime together, listening to their hearts instead of their heads. I’d do it all again. One hundred times again. It takes my breath away to think how easily we could have slipped past each other during that busy, distracted spring of 1992, never to know what soul mate meant.

There were winter days in medieval ruelles of Paris and late summer afternoons in Irish meadows. Hundreds of miles of Seattle pavement under my running shoes (and there will be hundreds more, believe me: Body and I are working out the terms). Sunsets over Shilshole Bay. The sweet joy of new friendships blooming. The unexpected embrace of a colleague who says, “Things are better with you here.” Laughter, dancing, beer and music in a beautiful community that is home, with spirited and loving people who are my family.

And there are my words, my sentences, paragraphs, pages. The slowly but steadily growing word count on a manuscript which has become my anchor, my refuge, my way – thank you, Richard Hugo – of saying the world and I have a chance. Perhaps Hugo meant that by the act of creating art, the world and I have chance together. And that perhaps I can, I should, I must, use my words to pursue what I believe is right and try to create good out of so much sadness.

Brendan and I went for a long walk late in the afternoon of this, the shortest day. I’m not one for portents, but I’ll share this photo I captured of a Bald eagle against the cerulean sky and diamond-bright moon. I’ll take the raptor’s presence as the last blessing of this long season of darkness and be grateful for a moment of grace, no matter what the next seasons may bring.

Bald eagle, Green Lake, Winter Solstice

I am ready to meet this longest night and then watch as, minute by minute, it shrinks into the New Year and succumbs to the light of Spring.

“I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live by the light that I have.”
Attributed to Abraham Lincoln. No matter who said it, I like it.