I was recently read and reviewed The Lotus Eaters by Tatjana Soli as part of the TLC Book Tour. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and it will be on my top reads of 2011. If you haven't read The Lotus Eaters yet, I do recommend this intriguing and beautifully written story.
I am honored to announce that author Tatjana Soli has stopped by my blog for a guest post. Please join me in welcoming her and read on for her post.
The Origin of the Novel, or How Did You Two Meet?
Traveling around the country to talk with people about my book, The Lotus Eaters, I get asked the perfectly legitimate question: What inspired you to write it? I usually have a moment of hesitation, what my husband calls my deer-in-the-headlights look. It’s not because I’m trying to dissemble, mislead, be purposely vague, but it is such a complicated question that it’s hard to know where to start.
This month I’m teaching an Intro to Novel class, and the great thing about teaching is that it forces you to articulate what you know instinctively in your gut. You know how to drive a car, but when pressed to teach someone, the idea of “not knowing” in order to explain is a difficult one to master. It’s the same dilemma as when someone asks you how you met your husband (boyfriend, significant other). What was the moment when you knew this was the real thing? Complicated indeed.
The easy thing to reach for is the photo. I was flipping through a photography book, Requiem, honoring the work of photographers killed in Indochina during the wars there. One photo of a female photographer, Dickey Chapelle, was like a bolt of lightning. A surprise that women were there, and at the moment of learning that to also learn that she had been killed by a landmine at the very start of that conflict. But there was more, the novelistic detail: this battle-hardened, Marine-chasing, female combat photographer, out on patrol in rural Vietnam, was wearing pearl earrings. I was fascinated that in the strenuous denial of female qualities in order to fit in to the fraternity of journalists and soldiers, she took this one trouble to remind herself of who she was. My character, Helen, is nothing like the WWII-era Chapelle, and yet that picture did the all important thing — it ignited my imagination and took me on the ten year journey to this book. But still, this isn’t the whole truth.
I live in Orange County, CA, home to the largest community of Vietnamese outside of Vietnam. For the most part, these are Vietnamese from southern Vietnam who fled after the war ended. People who risked their lives, who left everything behind, to start a new life. I heard and read stories of the immigrant experience that had great resonance for me. My mom lost her parents and left Hungary for Austria. As a single mother, she worked for NATO in Naples, Italy, and when the chance came to move to America, she took it to make a better life for the both of us. But that, too, isn’t the whole story.
We came to America and moved to the very specific America of a military base, Ford Ord, in Monterey, CA, during the late sixties. Although I was a small girl, my friends all had fathers who were being sent off to war. Although as children we didn’t understand what was happening, there were huge emotional things going on around us. Fathers wouldn’t come back, and the mothers and children left. I never totally forgot that time. Understanding the war became an obsession.
All of these answers are part of the truth. The larger truth of novels is that they grow of themselves, that over time, both the work and the novelist change. The truth is that if you are lucky, the work over time creates a sum greater than the parts you consciously create. Even if the novelist is at times inarticulate to its origins.
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Thank you for stopping by Tatjana and for sharing the different influences that led you to write your novel.
'The larger truth of novels is that they grow of themselves, that over time, both the work and the novelist change.' - What an interesting thought that the novel can take on a life of its own. Not only does the novel grow, but the writer does as well.
Best of luck with your book! I was truly taken in while reading The Lotus Eaters and felt transported to another other place and time while reading this passionate novel. I do hope to read more of your work in the future.
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About the author:
Tatjana Soli is a novelist and short story writer. Born in Salzburg, Austria, she attended Stanford University and the Warren Wilson MFA Program.
Her stories have appeared in StoryQuarterly, Confrontation, Gulf Coast, Other Voices, Nimrod, Third Coast, Carolina Quarterly, Sonora Review and North Dakota Quarterly among other publications.
Her work has been twice listed in the 100 Distinguished Stories in Best American Short Stories and nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She was awarded the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Prize, the Dana Award, finalist for the Bellwether Prize, and received scholarships to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.
She lives with her husband in Orange County, California, and teaches through the Gotham Writers’ Workshop.
Visit Tatjana's website here
