The Big Idea: Victor Ladis Schultz

By examining one’s present, you can catch glimpses of the past. Every moment in history leads to this current one, and this sentiment is noted by author Victor Ladis Schultz in the Big Idea for his newest novel, The Book of the Jaguar. VICTOR LADIS SCHULTZ: What if the lone survivor had to take all the bodies home himself? Sorry, that sounds like I’m elevator-pitching you, but to be honest I’m elevator-pitching myself. Or, anyway, that’s what I was doing the day I asked myself the question, the day this novel started stirring in my head. I’d had this image—a lone soldier, a bunch of pyres, a desolation—and the question rose up unbidden. I was taken with the possibilities of the setup: a vignette about each decedent’s homecoming as my narrator returns their bones to their family, with those vignettes then gradually building into a larger portrait of the military company as it’d been in life. That portrait-building was everything, I quickly realized. Sure, readers would wanna learn what…