A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
by Robert Olen Butler
Summary
Fifteen stories, each narrated by a different Vietnamese immigrant living in southern Louisiana, in New Orleans and Lake Charles and the shrimping towns along the coast. They came out in 1975 or later, and they are now running groceries, repairing engines, waiting tables and losing arguments with their American born children.
In the title story an old man in Louisiana is visited nightly by the ghost of Ho Chi Minh, whom he knew in Paris in 1917 when the future leader worked as a pastry cook, and who has come back still worried about getting the glaze on a cake right.
Elsewhere a former South Vietnamese officer takes work he considers beneath him. A woman married to an American tries to explain a household spirit to a man who thinks she means a rat. A man goes to a strip club to see a dancer he believes is a woman from his village. Butler stays inside each narrator completely and never once cuts away to an American explaining them.
The recurring subject is not the fighting. It is what happens to a marriage, a religion or a father's authority when the whole apparatus that supported it is eight thousand miles away, and how quickly children stop needing any of it.
The stories run about fifteen pages each and the prose is unhurried and plain, closer to speech than to literary style. Read a few at a time rather than straight through, because the voices sit close enough in register to blur across a single sitting.
Ghosts appear in several of them and are treated as an ordinary feature of the household rather than as a device, which is one of the collection's quietest arguments about what the reader is expected to find strange. Best for readers who want the Vietnam War written from the side of the people who lost a country rather than a war.
Historical Context & Significance
A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, one of the few story collections ever to take it.
Robert Olen Butler served in Vietnam as a United States Army counterintelligence agent and linguist, speaks Vietnamese fluently, and spent years afterwards among the Vietnamese communities of southern Louisiana, where tens of thousands of refugees settled after 1975 because the delta country and the Catholic parishes resembled home.
At the time, American fiction about Vietnam was overwhelmingly about American soldiers. Butler's book was among the first widely read works to hand the narration to Vietnamese civilians and to treat resettlement, rather than combat, as the subject. A later edition adds two stories, Salem and Missing, that return the collection to Vietnam itself.