Robert Olen Butler

Friends have suffered with me as I've whined about every Pulitzer winner I've read that was a book of stories. Well, struggled through. I don't say "short stories" because, to me, a short story is 10 p. or less. With each of the others, I had to push myself to finish each story, setting minimum page limits to read each day and rarely meeting that minimum. Thank heaven for library policies allowing multiple renewals. But I digress.

Good Scent from a Strange Mountain was the opposite. I enjoyed show more every story. I loved the wide variety of voices and subject matters. Most of all I loved the story-telling. I came to care quickly about each of the characters, feeling that they may well be my neighbors. Each story felt complete in itself without leaving the uncomfortable feeling of "now what?". It is as if you, the reader, are handed an interesting photograph and the author says "let me tell you what led up to this picture". And then with deft skill, he guides you there, through the ups and downs and sideways slips. You always know how the story will end because of the photograph. Still, when he finishes the tale, you now understand the poignancy of pathway that led to the photograph.

Excellent, excellent book. Especially for a book of stories. Butler is a masterful story-teller of the old school -- real life, not New Yorker snobbery. show less

These stories were beautiful and tragic without cliche. As a reader of the Weekly World News in my youth, I appreciated the tenderness with which Butler treated his characters inside their exceptional storylines. And as a reader of too many established adult male authors, I enjoyed the way he treated his female characters, and the way he made them human without at all objectifying them. I also appreciated the structure of the book, with the first and final stories as bookends to the rest. show more These, also, were my favorites, as they were good, natural, and immersive as far as historical fiction goes. show less

A Papaphile's Delight! - Bibliomysteries #38
Review of the Mysterious Press/Open Road eBook (December 18, 2018) of the Mysterious Press hardcover & paperback (April 15, 2018).

Hem said, "She put every word I've ever written into a valise and allowed them all to be stolen."
"Man, on man," I said. "Every word?"
"Originals and copies," he said. His voice broke with this. His eyes glistened in the incandescent light. "Three years of work. Poems. Stories. Longer stuff. The novel set at the war, the

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one I began in Chicago. A long story about fishing."

One of the great legends about Ernest "Papa" Hemingway is the story that he lost all of his early pre-1922 work when his wife Hadley had a suitcase stolen at the Gare de Lyon train station in Paris, France. Hadley was travelling to Switzerland to meet Ernest and thought that as a surprise she would bring all his draft fiction work along for him to work on while he was doing newspaper reporting on the Lausanne Conference of 1922-23.

See photograph at https://i.pinimg.com/originals/63/7e/31/637e3161226cd152501351aabc31a1da.jpg
Ernest Hemingway (right, with bandaged head) and Sylvia Beach (2nd from right) and two friends in front of Beach's bookstore "Shakespeare and Company" in 1922 Paris, France. Image sourced from Pinterest.

Robert Olen Butler has constructed a delightful fictional reason for the theft and for its resolution. In the story Hemingway asks his war correspondent friend Christopher "Kit" Marlowe Cobbs to help him out. Kit has ties to the intelligence community and suspects a possible connection from Hemingway's reporting days during the Greco-Turkish War. He traces the valise on that basis but there is a surprising twist to the end of the story.

Even though parts of the fiction diverge from reality (e.g. it was a suitcase and not a valise, the early story My Old Man (1922) had been sent out for publishing consideration and therefore was not lost, etc.), there is plenty here to delight Hemingway fans. There are encounters with early Hemingway supporter Sylvia Beach at her Paris bookstore of "Shakespeare and Company." There are meetings with early Hemingway mentor [author:Ezra Pound|30055]. There are various references to writers such as Lincoln Steffens, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce and Sylvia Beach's bold publication of his novel Ulysses, etc. All are wonderful references for fans of 1920's Paris "Lost Generation" authors and writing.

Although the Hemingway manuscripts don't strictly meet the definition of "deadly books" which are the mandate for the commissions of the Bibliomysteries series from The Mysterious Press, for a long-term Papaphile such as myself this was a joy to read.

Trivia and Links
There have been several earlier fictions about the lost Hemingway manuscripts such as The Hemingway Thief (2016) and several under the title Hemingway's Suitcase.

Robert Olen Butler (1946-) is an American author of 18 novels and 6 short story collections which range from historical fiction to magic realism. His most popular book (based on the number of GR ratings and reviews) is the short story collection A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (1992) inspired by his experiences in Vietnam. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1993.

The Bibliomysteries series are short stories commissioned by Otto Penzler's The Mysterious Press to be written around the theme of deadly books. They are individually published in limited edition signed hardcovers followed by paperbacks and ebooks, and periodically collected in anthology editions such as Bibliomysteries (2013, containing stories 1-15) and Bibliomysteries: Volume Two (2018, containing stories 16-30). There does not appear to be a Goodreads Listopia for them, but on Library Thing the current listing (as of early-October 2024) includes 41 short stories Note that there is a double count of #33 and that book #41 isn't numbered yet in that list. show less

Like male sexuality itself, They Whisper is occasionally sublime, at times confused, from time-to-time powerfully animalistic to the point of dangerousness, regularly pathetic, and more often than not a bit ridiculous. Butler has written a disarmingly honest book--sometimes painfully so--about male sexual fantasies, and about the failure of males to understand female sexuality. Ira Holloway is his 40-year-old protagonist, and Ira is a sensitive new age guy. He's no "player," but he's had show more many women. When he finally settles down and gets married, his wife turns out to have been sexually molested by her father, and this dark secret life drives her to a morbid Catholicism and eventual insanity.* The 'they' of Butler's title are Holloway's numerous past lovers, who exist within, and who present themselves continually in his current sexual encounters despite Ira's love for his wife. When she demands he respond only to her and to her physicality without resorting to internal images, memories, or ideals, Ira finds himself sexually paralyzed for the first time.

This is not a novel to breeze through at the beach. There's a lot of sex, some of it rendered erotically, and some of it hateful and disturbing. What most surprised me is the complete and utter absence of humor in the book. Sex is also funny, after all. Or it should be.

Above I used the possessive verb "had" to describe Ira's experience of women, and part of what Butler explores is the idea of sexual possession. One "takes," one "has" lovers--but is that really the case? Does one possess another, or merely an internalized ideal of the other? Ira fantasizes he can hear women's 'secret voices' when he fucks them, and there are pages and pages of these women's interior monologues that are, of course, actually Ira's imaginings of their interior monologues. I think this is an ingenious portrayal of the often interior nature of sexual intimacy (what we think of as shared intimacy is usually anything but). Many people--perhaps most--fantasize during sex, thus relegating their partners to a second-fiddle status in the actual sexual act. Ira creates elaborate narratives in his head, involving women he's had in the past, women he's only seen and desired in the briefest of moments, about the woman he's with in more ideal circumstances. All of this strikes me as interesting, as Butler is relating sex to the imaginative act of writing or creating art. Stephen Stills once sang about loving 'the one you're with' if you can't be with the Ideal who may or may not exist elsewhere; Butler's on the same track. Butler also explores sexuality using religion and incest and colonialism and the Viet Nam war metaphorically, with mixed results.

A difficult book, and perhaps an elaborate and interesting failure, but thought-provoking and at times sexy. ANY book tackling the fucked-up substance of male sexuality (which is far too often thought of in overly simplistic terms) is perhaps doomed to failure. Kudos to Butler for giving it a shot.

*The reader must bear in mind, of course, that Ira only understands his wife's sexual abuse through her "inner voice." We have no independent verification outside of Ira's internal monologue that it ever in fact happened at all. show less