Robert Olen Butler

A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain is one of the most extraordinary collections of short stories that I have ever read.

Each of the 15 short stories is written in the first person, from the standpoint of a different individual. All of the fictional narrators are immigrants to the US from Vietnam who are living in New Orleans. The characters are distinctive and memorable, include males and females, and range from young to very old. The stories are powerful and evocative, very human stories show more of love, loss, betrayal, and reconciliation.

Each of them deserves to be savored. In fact, I cannot read more than one in a setting, and they stay with me long afterwards.

Summarizing their themes does not do them justice. "Fairy Tail" is told from the standpoint of a "Miss Nol", an exotic dancer in a New Orleans nightclub who used to work as a bar girl in Saigon -- and who, remarkably, finds what she needed from an unlikely source. "Open Arms" is related by a Vietnamese man who worked as an interpreter during the war. He recounts an episode in which a fighter from the other side is welcomed by the US forces -- with tragic, unforeseeable consequences. "In the Clearing" is told from the standpoint of an expatriate man who is writing a letter back home to Vietnam, to the son he has never met (the man had to leave his homeland at the end of the war, leaving his pregnant wife behind). In "Mid-Autumn", a young woman who is married to an American man, talks to her unborn child about her first betrothed from back home -- who died in the war. In "Preparation", a woman in a mortuary prepares the hair and makeup of her deceased best friend -- with an epiphany that explains their relationship. In the eponymous tale, a 100 year old man imagines that he is being visited by Ho Chi Minh, whom he knew in his younger years. "The American Couple" is a longer piece than the others (at 79 pages), and is a strange and humorous tale about told by a young woman who has come to embrace American pop culture... and whose her husband and his new American friend play seriously at reliving their military experiences.

The author of these stories, Robert Olen Butler, spent years in Vietnam as an army linguist where he adapted to the local culture. That experience, and his ongoing acquaintance with the expatriate Vietnamese communities around New Orleans helped give him the ability to adopt the personas of the fictional narrators of the stories. Given that he is European- American, I expected that some reviewers at Amazon would object to Butler's writing on the grounds of "cultural appropriation". However, of the several reviews that I read, I didn't see any who did so. Perhaps this is because the voicings seem (to a reader's ears) so real and because the stories are so powerful and so sensitively rendered.

I can see why this author won a Pulitzer for these stories. I recommend them highly. show less

I saw this book on a cart outside Books-a-Million years and years ago. I looked through it, thought it was intriguing, and put it back. I have thought of it at various times over the years, and wished I had purchased it. Not only could I not remember the author's name, I also could not remember the title. The only thing I remembered was that each page was 240 words in length and there was no punctuation.

Fast forward to last week, when I just happened upon it online. Kismet!! It was at Half show more Price Books, and I ordered it immediately. Imagine my delight when it arrived signed by the author!! Of course, it is signed "To Lauren", but that matters not to me.

On with the review. First of all, the premise of this one is magnificent! The last thoughts of a freshly decapitated person (well ... almost all are people). I would have found it interesting to know what the person was thinking about their current situation, but I'll bet it would have all been the same. Kind of a "Well, crap!" trail of thought. Instead, Olen Butler writes their last thoughts as the thing they loved most in life. It may be memories of a father, a lover, or a Messiah. What they would more than likely miss most.

Taking this vantage point not only varies the stories a great deal, it also gives insight into the lives of these people. As much as 240 words can.

I also love the fact that there is no punctuation. I can imagine the rambling thoughts of a dying person being just like this, and stopping in mid-thought, as all of these do.

All-in-all, this is a brilliant little book, and highly recommended. show less

In Severance, Robert Olen Butler combines two seemingly unrelated ideas: first, that consciousness lasts for one and a half minutes after decapitation, and second, that people speak at a rate of 160 words per minute when in a heightened state of emotion. Since people are likely pretty emotional once they've been decapitated, Butler figured that their final thoughts would run precisely 240 words -- the length of each of the book's 62 pieces, which seek to "capture the flow of thoughts and show more feelings that rush through a mind after the head has been severed."

Yeah, I know, sounds like a stupid gimmick that you'd want to throw across the room after a couple of entries. But Butler moves each one of these pieces -- which are really prose poems, although they're billed as short stories -- way beyond the gimmicky. Some of his subjects are fictional (Medusa; the dragon slain by Saint George; Mud, a man decapitated by a saber-toothed tiger); some are historical (Robespierre, Marie Antoinette, Thomas More); and some contemporary (Jayne Mansfield, Nicole Brown Simpson), but all are eloquent. And surprisingly, although many of them are sad, none of these pieces is morbid, as they focus on life rather than death. The entries can be difficult to read (Mary Queen of Scots moved me to tears, believe it or not), but just as many are beautiful, with dreamlike images blending effortlessly from one to the next even within the short wordspan Butler has allotted himself.

The book won't quite make you want to decapitate yourself to test Butler's theory and see whether you can be as eloquent as his subjects, but damn near. (And Butler decapitates himself at the end of the book anyway, so it's been done already and you needn't bother.) show less

Wow, this was a little unexpected. I knew of Robert Olen Butler from the novel Hell and the short stories in Tabloid Dreams. Both were deeply surreal and maintained a light touch. This one runs much lighter on the surreal but much, much deeper on the intensity.

Sam Cunningham is 115 years old, living his last day, and he is talking with God. Telling God the story of his life, reliving particular moments, not so much of his own choosing.

What does God want to know from Sam? What matters?

I show more don’t remember seeing the word “conscience” once in Late City, but my reading put the word at its center.

God doesn’t want to know if Sam has lived a successful life, if he has created a business, climbed the ladder, amassed wealth, lived the “American Dream,” built “shareholder value”. . . None of that. He’s God after all. He wants to know the life of Sam’s conscience.

He particularly wants Sam to recount and relive poignant experiences and tensions in his life, what those experiences and tensions mean to him, and how he resolves or fails to resolve them.

Sam was born in 1901, and he is dying in 2016, as Donald Trump is elected president. He has grown up in the Jim Crow south, with a rigid and dominating father. He has lived through World War I, as a (technically too) young solider, a sharp-shooter who by his own telling has killed more than a hundred men. He has been a newspaperman, covering and at least to some extent doing the bidding of Al Capone. He has been a husband and a father. He has seen his own son go off to fight in World War II. He has outlived his wife and his son, and now he lies in a nursing home with 115 years behind him.

A heavy theme throughout is manhood and true masculinity. As a boy growing into a man, Sam is under his father’s thumb. The lesson his father teaches him is the circle his father draws in the dirt around the two of them. The circle contains who matters, who he can rely on, in some strong sense, his ethical boundary. Those outside the boundary are the others, who matter less and who can be relied on for less. The ones who are not us.

Even when Sam announces to his father that he’s going to join the army to fight in the war, his father claims ownership. It’s Sam’s decision, through and through, but his father takes him to the recruitment center and orchestrates and owns his signing up. In an important sense this is to be Sam’s moment, taking on moral importance and identity in the world, but his father tries to own that moment.

During the war, Sam faces more than just the test of battle — he faces the test of caring for his fellow soldiers in ways that conflict with the version of manhood his father has given him. It’s a test that Sam will re-take again and again, right to his last days.

That test is a test of caring, of being enough of a man to care beyond the circle his father drew in the dirt around the two of them.

That is what matters when Sam talks with God. How Sam has resolved the problem of the circle his father drew.

If you don’t believe in the God that Sam talks with, I don’t think it matters. And it doesn’t matter whether your test has to do with masculinity, femininity, or anything else that defines the quality and boundaries of your life and how you’ve cared about the others in it. The question is about the quality of your life, your conduct as a person of conscience, or not.

Sam refers to one instance of this test as a “moment I am meant to reckon with.” A moment that lasts, as the moment in which you will have to make a choice that determines the quality of the life you live. And you may, as Sam sometimes does, make a choice that you will need to “reckon with” sooner or later. That’s what God is interested in here — it’s not the choices, but the reckoning with them that Sam now must do.

So . . . heavy book. Like I said, not exactly what I was expecting, given the other things I’ve read by Butler, but all the better for it - a different direction and a very different experience. show less