"Like so many paper lanterns around the village square": a chorus of strangers in Robert Olen Butler's "A good scent from a strange mountain"

• Autores: Robert M. Luscher
• Localización: The Short Story in English [Recurso electrónico]: crossing boundaries / Gema Soledad Castillo García (ed. lit.), María Rosa Cabellos Castilla (ed. lit.), Juan Antonio Sánchez Jiménez (ed. lit.), Vincent Carlisle Espínola (ed. lit.), 2006, ISBN 8481387096, págs. 587-601
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Dispersed across various locales in southern Louisiana, the Vietnamese immigrants in Robert Olen Butler’s A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain populate a short story sequence similar to Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, the genre’s prototypical work. Butler’s volume lacks the strong unifying devices featured in other collections of autonomous but interrelated stories, relying instead on reiterated themes, repeated motifs, and juxtaposition to create coherence. Given its diversity of characters and locations, Butler’s volume places more emphasis on the variety and discontinuity of characters sharing the commonality of diasporic displacement and nostalgia for Vietnam. Separated from each other physically and by story boundaries, Butler’s first-person narrators are nonetheless part of an extended family, and their stories —taken together— shed thematic light on such reiterated themes as assimilation, spiritualism, imagination, and memory. Together their voices form a chorus, one emphasizing divergent yet contrapuntal modes of resolution. These narrators may be strangers to each other, but the polyphony of their voices as they confront estrangement and life’s strangeness takes full advantage of the short story sequence form to create a unique choral harmony.