A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain

First edition cover
Author	Robert Olen Butler
Cover artist	Jacket illustration by Neil Flewellen Jacket design by Carin Goldberg
Country	United States
Language	English
Published	1992 (Henry Holt)
Media type	Print (hardback & paperback)
Pages	249 pp (first edition, hardback)
ISBN	(first edition, hardback)
OCLC	24285600
Dewey Decimal	813/.54 20
LC Class	PS3552.U8278 G66 1992

A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain is a 1992 collection of short stories by Robert Olen Butler. It received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1993.

Each story in the collection is narrated by a different Vietnamese immigrant living in the US state of Louisiana. The stories are largely character-driven, with cultural differences between Vietnam and the United States as an important theme. Many of the stories were first published in journals such as The Hudson Review, The Southern Review, and The Virginia Quarterly Review. The collection was re-released in 2001 with two additional stories, "Salem" and "Missing".

The opening story is set during the Vietnam War. The narrator, a translator for the Australian forces, recounts the story of a North Vietnamese communist named Thập who joins the Australian forces as a spy, after the communists massacre his family. When the Australian soldiers bring him to a screening of pornographic films, Thập seems overwhelmed and disgusted. The narrator speculates that, as a former Communist, he considers pornography immoral, and that it simultaneously reminds him of his longing for his dead wife. Thập later kills an Australian soldier and himself.

"Mr. Green" is narrated by a Catholic woman who was taught by her grandfather about ancestor worship. As a child, she was saddened when her grandfather told her that she could not tend to the worship of her family members because she is a woman. Mr. Green is a talking parrot that belonged to her great grandfather; after his death, she cares for the parrot, bringing him to the United States with her. When Mr. Green grows old and melancholy, plucking out his own feathers, the narrator kills him by wringing his neck as she had learned from her mother and grandmother. This story is about gendered values. The narrator must come to terms with her grandfather's subtle misogyny and establish her own self-worth as a woman. This story focuses on the conflict between ancient, honorable but constricting values and the modern assertion of femininity. As the narrator leaves Vietnam she takes a reminder of this bonding Confucian values with her in the form of Mr. Green. The death of Mr. Green is therefore symbolic.