Even though this wasn't a pool read (book to read by the pool that doesn't matter if it gets wet and easy to pick up and get back in the groove after days away), it could have been, up til the last story. The first 13 stories were like potato chips and I couldn't gobble them down fast enough. I checked this out after my husband read/bought it. I tend to dismiss Vietnam War books--too depressing, violent, mucho macho military men figures, and I'm getting a little burned out from WWII novels latel...

I think white people need to stop telling non-white peoples' stories. It just reeks of uncomfortable colonialism. The short story where Butler writes his character as a cheap, two-bit Vietnamese hooker with the awkward stereotypical English one might expect from a recent war victim is just too pathetic for me to swallow. Some nice sentences here and there, but generally a flop.

[2.5] About a third of the way through this collection, the stories started to irritate me. The writing felt like it was put through a strainer to become stiff and bland. I thought, "a bad translation." Of course, these are not translated stories. They are the stories of Vietnamese refugees, written in first person by Robert Olen Butler, a white American. I don't like the idea of putting narrow restrictions on a writer's imagination - why shouldn't Butler imagine these voices? And they were cert...

First let me say, “Damn you Robert Olen Butler. Damn you to hell.” Because now any book I pick up next can only pale by comparison to this exquisitely beautiful story collection. A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain is a Pulitzer-winning compilation of stories primarily about the Vietnamese diaspora, with the majority of the stories written from the perspective of immigrants living in and around New Orleans.I am at a loss to adequately describe the poignance of Butler’s prose in this collection....

Like many of the older Pulitzer Prize winners I've read this year, my copy of A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain came to me used. In the pile of award-stamped paperbacks I've accrued I've seen unseemly coffee stains, wrinkled and peeling lamination, and dog-eared page corners, but this book is the first one that has been so obviously used by a university student. Pink highlighter overlays declarative sentences and artfully boxes in paragraphs, while pencil markings draw arrows between lines on...

I feel bad giving this book only one star since it won the Pulitzer, but I did not like this book at all. It's a collection of short stories about Vietnamese immigrants in America. The dust jacket promised "lyrical" but delivered "short and choppy" instead. The stories could be revealing about the Vietnamese immigrant's experience in America, but the writing style is off-putting and frankly, doesn't make much sense to me. Even if the stories are from a Vietnamese person's point of view, and even...

There's a reason this won the Pulitzer. While a few of the stories read more like retellings of myths, they are still so unique and melodic that I give this a 5. One of my favorite story collections.

“I turned and looked and the old man was standing beside the car. My wife embraced him and his head was perched on her shoulder and there was nothing on his face at all, no feeling except perhaps the faintest wrinkling of puzzlement. Perhaps I should have stayed at my wife’s side as the old man went on to explain to her that she didn’t exist. But I could not. I wished to walk briskly away, far from this house, far from the old man and his granddaughter. I wished to walk as fast as I could, to r

Exemplary short story collection! Have not been moved this way since Jhumpa Lahiri's (also Pulitzer Prize-winning) "Interpreter of Maladies." CANNOT POSSIBLY BE MISSED by any serious student of the Short Story or modern American literature. A late night top-notch Scotch... or an aroma that arrives at you with an intimate immediacy.

Even as the light purple hues of dusk shifted into night, I sat still, completing this book. Never mind that the only reading light I had was the dim glare of outdoor lighting because by then, I was transfixed. I had been transported to another world and I only realized this once those gigantic Southern bugs started to land on my page and I heard the faint whimper of my dog as she stared at me through the sliding glass doors—probably wondering what in the world I was doing sitting outdoors witho...

I forgot that I finished this finally. I didn't throw it, but I definitely didn't like it very much. I think that writers CAN write from other points of view (just like readers can read and understand different points of view than their own) but all but one narrator rang false; what I heard behind the "Vietnamese" voice was always a white guy, probably from the midwest, who maybe went to Vietnam for a while. I can hear him working on it. Oddly, the story that had the strongest and most-likely-to...

a white guy writing vietnamese stories in choppy language as if it were written by a non-english speaker. nobody thinks in language this choppy, and though ESL speakers might not speak as eloquently in English, it doesn't mean their thoughts are disorganized and choppy. it was also just boring and it felt like a chore to read. i quit part way through.

Robert Olen Butler served in Vietnam 1969 to 1971 - first as a counter-intelligence agent, and then as a translator. In an interview he remembers the time he spent in the country:The army got me coming out of the University of Iowa, but they sent me to language school for a year before I went over. I spoke fluently from my first day there. And then I did work in intelligence for five months out in the countryside. I loved Vietnam and I loved the culture and I loved the people, I mean instantly.

Back in my book selling days, Robert Olen Butler's Tabloid Dreams was, shortly after it came out, THE book all the cool kids working in bookstores were recommending to anyone who cared for a recommendation from a kid in a bookstore. I got caught up in the Tabloid Dreams hysteria that gripped my circle of co-workers for three weeks back in 1996, forcing countless unsuspecting Calgarians to buy the collection of short stories. What's that Ma'am? You like Maeve Binchy? Why then you will adore Tablo...

The best thing a book can do is to transport me into the world of people I do not know. If I can learn, think, feel... If I can come out of it missing the characters I met and befriended... If I can better understand a culture or religion, or both... If I can believe that I am changed. Then that is the book that deserves a solid 5 stars.Robert Olen Butler served two years in Vietnam. After returning home to the USA he began writing stories which were published in several literary journals. In 19...

So, I didn't realize this was a book of short stories until I started it. I knew it was a Pulitzer Price winner and that was enough to make me grab it. Short stories are not my favorites (I prefer a long book in which I can wallow) and sort of automatically come with a max of 4 stars. In general it was an okay collection and I learned a bit about Vietnamese culture, but the stories were not sufficiently different or interesting enough to garner 4 stars.The stories are all about Vietnamese immigr...

This is a wonderful collection of stories that combine to give you a lovely picture of Vietnamese culture.  I was shocked to learn that the author was not Vietnamese.  He served in Vietnam as a counterintelligence officer and translator.   His love for the people there shines vividly through these wonderful stories.    They alternate in settings between Vietnam and America and in voices male and female.  The opening story called ."Open Arms" seems to be somewhat autobiographical since it's a s...

A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain was a beautiful collection of short stories about Vietnamese refugees in America and the ghosts and closets in their pasts. I can see why it won the 1993 Pulitzer having also read Black Water which for me did not measure up and I doubt I will like the other runner-up, At Weddings and Wakes. There are fifteen stories here which, all told in the first person, mostly alternate between male and female narrators. In the third story, "The Trip Back", the male narra...

Robert Olen Butler served in Vietnam as Military Intelligence and as a translator during the war the in the sixties and part of the seventies. Fluent in Vietnamese, he said his favorite time was walking the back streets of Saigon and crouching in the doorways, getting to know a people that he considers to be some of the most warm-hearted and open people he has ever known.A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain is a collection of short stories each from a different person's point of view. Some of th...

There was some really good writing in this book, I enjoyed Butler's style and tone, most of the stories were moving and beautifully crafted with mostly interesting characters and plots.However, I did feel that by writing a full book of short stories on the same topic, namely the war in Vietnam and living in the USA as a Vietnamese immigrant after the war, a lot was lost because it felt like repetition. The similarity in the stories' structure and tone of narration gave the whole book a somewhat