Bestselling author Karl Marlantes discussed his latest novel, ‘Deep River,’ at Columbia Forum at the Liberty Theatre on Jan. 21.

Karl Marlantes, a bestselling author who grew up in Seaside, was inspired by his family history when writing his latest novel, “Deep River,” which he said is based on Naselle and its Finnish immigrants.

Marlantes grew up in a multilingual household hearing Finnish, Greek, English, Norwegian and Swedish. He said the cultural, religious and political differences created a sense of “cultural schizophrenia,” which in many ways inspired the central themes of the novel.

He discussed his family’s history, their background in the forestry and fishing industries and his reasons for writing the novel to nearly 200 people during a Columbia Forum talk Jan. 21 at the Liberty Theatre in Astoria.

The novel is about three Finnish siblings who fled to the United States in the early 1900s and settled in a logging community in southwest Washington state. Each of the siblings grow to express and represent different perspectives — one is deeply religious, the other is an entrepreneur and fearless logger and their sister, Aino, is an idealistic communist.

Aino, the heroine and principal character in the novel, begins her story arc as a fanatical communist who was a leader in the effort to unionize loggers. Her character is contrasted by another character in the story, Aksel, inspired by Marlantes’ grandfather, who wants nothing to do with unions.

“It’s almost allegorical in what we face in our country today. We have the individual and we have the collective,” Marlantes said.

He said people argue for one or the other, “but we need them both.”

As Aino’s character arc goes on, she and Aksel finally come together in a dance that Marlantes says is symbolic of the synergy created in the joining of the individual and the collective.

He said although the time period is often romanticized, he wanted to show the dance between individualism and collectivism, the feminine and the masculine, and between different cultures, religions and political ideologies.

He said one of the major themes in the novel is expressed through a Native American woman named Vasutäti.

Vasutäti is symbolic of mysticism, but also of what has been lost — the loss of old growth forests, the loss of the Columbia River to dams and the loss of local native cultures.

Marlantes, who also wrote “Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War” and “What It Is Like To Go To War,” said the life of his Finnish grandmother and her love for the Columbia River inspired his imagination for the novel.

“She had a relationship with the river,” he said. “She was an atheist. She was a communist. And I asked her if she ever had any thought that there might be a deity. And she said, ‘Well, if there is one it’s the river.’”