A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (1992) is a collection of seventeen stories by Robert Olen Butler, each told from the perspective of a Vietnamese immigrant living in Louisiana after the Vietnam War. The book went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1993.

All are about fourteen pages long except for the roughly eighty-page “The American Couple,” which I thought was the best of the bunch.

This one digs deeper into the characters and presents a woman’s perspective on veterans, one of whom is her Vietnamese husband and the other an American.

The two men meet while vacationing with their wives in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, and their intense relationship, rooted in their wartime past, leads to an extraordinary and extreme roleplay, a kind of bitter capture-the-flag game. This unfolds at the location where the 1964 film The Night of the Iguana was shot, a place we’re told resembles parts of Vietnam’s coastal and mountainous landscape.

As for the other stories, some stayed with me more than others. Cultural differences—central to most, if not all, of them—make the collection engaging. What felt slightly awkward though is that these aren’t firsthand accounts from Vietnamese writers but imagined voices created by a white American author.

With the greater emphasis today on publishing diverse voices, I wonder if Butler would receive the same recognition were the book released now. That said, he served in Vietnam as a translator, and the level of detail in his writing suggests a genuine understanding of and respect for the people he portrays. For that, and for the empathy required to attempt such perspectives, I admire the effort.