A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain | Criticism

This literature criticism consists of approximately 5 pages of analysis & critique of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain.

A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain | Criticism

This literature criticism consists of approximately 5 pages of analysis & critique of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain.
This section contains 1,170 words
(approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Critical Review by Richard Eder

SOURCE: Eder, Richard. “Seeing the Vietnamese.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (29 March 1992): 3, 7.

In the following review, Eder compliments Butler's portrayal of Vietnamese people in A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, drawing attention to his skillful evocation of the characters' sense of loss.

For the Vietnamese immigrants in Robert Olen Butler's stories, distance is sentient. It buzzes inside them like a crossed telephone line, a haunting syncopation under the forthright American rhythms they are trying to learn.

Butler's Vietnamese live, for the most part, in waterside communities in Louisiana: Lake Charles, Gretna, Versailles. The author himself lives and teaches in Lake Charles. Ever since he went to Saigon in 1971 as an Army linguist, he found his personal and literary vocation—unlike other writers there—less in exploring what it felt like to be an American in Vietnam than in what it felt like to Vietnam to have Americans...

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This section contains 1,170 words
(approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Critical Review by Richard Eder
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Critical Review by Richard Eder from Gale. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.