Cheryl's Reviews > A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

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 without her.

I had the great privilege to sit in on Butler's From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction seminar and now I see how his advice is indeed personal. In order to head back to the Vietnam of 1971, when he served as a Vietnamese linguist, he also had to transport himself from America, back to what must have been a dark time for him. I remember him telling a room full of students (paraphrasing this) that the test is not in the four hours that the writer goes back to this dreamlike state of imaginative trauma, rather, it is in how he or she manages to exist for the next twenty hours of real life, after he or she has revisited such a place.

Reading this 1993 Pulitzer-prize-winner, you get a sense that Butler wrote these stories from where he dreams.

Whenever a short-story collection adds a distinct checkmark to my reading experience, I often find myself flipping back through the pages with curiosity, closely examining each line just to understand the ‘how.’ It is in the bewitching voices of each Vietnamese character: young, old, male, female. Those first-person perspectives that drew me closer to each story. The haunting concoction of Vietnamese and American cultures. Butler took a huge risk when he decided to write about the challenges of the immigrant war survivor in America.

That night, I found myself in the mind of a Vietcong soldier, a Vietcong defector, an American MIA, and a Vietnamese refugee. With each convincing story and compelling voice of the narrator, I was transported to Vietnam and then back to America, to immigrant settlements in Louisiana: like Versailles and Lake Charles. When you read short-story collections often, it is thrilling whenever you run across a collection whose thematic appeal stands apart in this genre because you know that years later, if you you need to point to a collection that encompasses Vietnam in such a way, you will point to this one.