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Annotated by:
- Aull, Felice
- Date of entry: Jan-31-1997
- Last revised: Dec-01-2006
Summary
The narrator is a Vietnamese husband who has a beautiful, flirtatious wife. They have been living in the New Orleans area for more than a decade, arriving in America after the fall of South Vietnam. The husband tells a remarkable story about the lengths to which he has gone, both in Vietnam and in America, to intercept and discourage his wife’s extra-marital interests. The narrator is humorously self-deprecating and matter-of-fact.
In Vietnam, he was a spy for the Americans, and able to "bring fire from heaven" in the form of American rocket attacks to scare off his wife’s would-be lovers; in America, he adapts to the local culture by consulting a "low-down papa" voodoo specialist. What follows this consultation is a hilariously told sequence of events that succeeds finally in winning the wife’s loyalty.
Miscellaneous
Primary Source
A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
Publisher
Penguin
Place Published
New York
Edition
1993 (paperback)
Page Count
20
Commentary