Robert Olen Butler is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, and sixteen other novels including Hell, A Small Hotel, Perfume River, and the Christopher Marlowe Cobb series. He is also the author of six short story collections and a book on the creative process, From Where You Dream. He has twice won a National Magazine Award in Fiction and received the 2013 F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature. He teaches creative writing at Florida State University.
Butler's Faulknerian shuttling back and forth across the decades
has less to do with literary pyrotechnics than with cutting to the
chase. Perfume River hits its marks with a high-stakes intensity .
. . Butler's particulars on the two brothers' marriages are
comprehensively adroit . . . Butler's prose is fluid, and his
handling of his many time-shifts as lucid as it is urgent. His
descriptive gifts don't extend just to his characters' traits or
their Florida and New Orleans settings, but to the history he's
addressing . . . 'You share a war in one way,' Robert thinks. 'You
pass it on in another.' Perfume River captures both the agony and
subtlety of how that happens
*New York Times Book Review*
Though superficially a straightforward family drama, Perfume River
poses some deeply serious questions about the nature of our
engagement with war and the way throughout history it has served
the purpose of testing the resolve and courage of young men. It
also explores how notions of loyalty and duty can be part of a
son's genetic inheritance and what can happen when they are
challenged. And it reveals how, more than 40 years after its
ignominious end, the Vietnam War remains for some Americans an open
wound. Butler's refusal to even hint at easy answers to those
questions makes this a novel that succeeds in engaging us in
profound and important ways
*Bookreporter.com*
At the heart of the story - or stories, which move fluidly among
Robert, Darla and Jimmy, one character's thoughts sometimes
answering another's - is a knot of misunderstandings,
misconceptions and assumptions that begin to unravel with the
father's fall, only to be replaced by new if somewhat clearer
distortions
*Minneapolis Star Tribune*
This thoughtful and considered novel stands as a sobering reminder
that there are still members of an ageing generation to have, even
now, failed to find peace or closure
*The Sunday Herald *
An understated yet profound and incredibly hard hitting and
evocative novel that just simmers with tension
*LoveReading *
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