A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

Robert Olen Butler's acclaimed first novel, The Alleys of Eden, is one of the finest books ever written about the tragic American experience in Vietnam. In A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, his first book of short fiction, Butler offers a compelling chorus of voices that depicts another, heretofore unspoken, legacy of the Vietnam War-the experiences and memories of the many Vietnamese expatriates living in their adopted home of America.

Butler served in Vietnam in 1971 as an army linguist. Only twenty-six years old but fluent in the language, Butler quickly fell in love with the Vietnamese people, practically becoming one of them. Twenty years later, visiting the Vietnamese enclaves that cling to the Gulf's edge outside of New Orleans, he can still recall roaming the back alleys of Saigon in the middle of the night, when no one seemed to sleep and everyone treated the young GI as if he were family.

Now, as before, he listens to their stories of love, betrayal, and loss; of their myths and traditions; of their despair over a deadly fratricidal war; of their dreams of peace and life in a new land, even as they feel exiled from the land of their birth-and in the fifteen pieces gathered here, Butler gives voice to those who have too long been silent. Whether he is speaking from the perspective of a hundred-year-old man who believes he is being visited by Ho Chi Minh, or from that of a woman in the mortuary who prepares the makeup and hair of her deceased best friend and only then comes to understand their relationship, Butler writes with a cadenced authority and an authenticity that make for an absolutely memorable collection.