Finished: April, 2009
Pages: 249
Challenges:
** Spring Reading Thing
** Book Awards
** Pulitzer Prize Challenge
** 20 in 2009
** Support Your Local Library
** New Authors
** Read and Review
Amazon.com Review
The Vietnam War continues to play itself out in fiction, autobiography, and history books, but no American author has captured the experiences of the Vietnamese themselves--and caught their voices--more tellingly than Robert Olen Butler, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain. The 15 stories collected here, all written in the first person, blend Vietnamese folklore, the terrible, lingering memories of war, American pop culture and family drama. Butler's literary ventriloquism, as he mines the experiences of a people with a great literary tradition of their own, is uncanny; but his talents as a writer of universal truths is what makes this a collection for the ages.
Okay, I did not *get* most of this book. I think I am just not a short story kind of girl. From the reviews I read about this Pulitzer Prize winner in 1993, I thought I had picked something really special for several challenges. I did actually *get* most of the stories, but did not enjoy them. I felt that so many of his characters were wimpy, 2 dimensional and not very realistic or even actual portrayals of the Vietnamese people who settled predominately in New Orleans. Several of the stories were either shallow or so wrapped up in Asian myth that I got lost. I am sure I probably missed some of his message due to my own lack of knowledge regarding the Vietnam war. I was a young child during the 60's and early 70's and you can bet there was nothing about that war in my history books by the time I hit high school in the late 70's.
Good luck on the read-a-thon tomorrow. I'll be cheering you on.
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