An epic failure of research and imagination. The reviewers on GR who have rated this novel highly have generally praised its poetic evocation of love and loss. Okay, I can get that. The novel is an extended dirge of a life spent in unrequited longing as a result of a loveless childhood and an equally loveless adulthood. All of it told in prose like this:I am at sea again. I am at sea again. Not the choppy, churning body that bashes open a ship's hull like a newborn's soft skull. Yes, a sapphire that a ship's bow skims and grooves. A calming blue expanse between now and Sunday.That little paragraph is a description of the main character's emotions after learning that his current lover wants to see him again the next weekend. Here's another sample, this time the main character, Bình, describes love:Quinces are ripe, GertrudeStein, when they are the yellow of canary wings in midflight. They are ripe when their scent teases you with the snap of green apples and the perfumed embrace of coral roses. But even then quinces remain a fruit, hard and obstinate—useless, GertrudeStein, until they are simmered, coddled for hours above a low, steady flame. Add honey and water and watch their dry, bone-coloured flesh soak up the heat, coating itself in an opulent orange, not of the sunrises that you never see but of the insides of tree-riped papayas, a colour you can taste. To answer your question, GertrudeStein, love is not a bowl of quinces yellowing in a blue and white china bowl, seen but untouched.If that kind of writing is what you like, then go for it. Unfortunately, that is all you are going to get here. And frankly, that's far too little for me. It's irritating to be jerked out of a prose induced reverie when a metaphor for the forming of opinions is written thusly:But once they are formed, ours become the thick, thorny coat of a durian, a covering designed to forestall the odour of rot and decay deep inside.Now obviously, the writer does not know (a) that among us South-east Asians, durians are called the king of fruit and that odour is highly prized and (b) yes, you can smell that odour even with the thick thorny coat on. No indigenous Vietnamese man would describe the durian thusly. It would be the equivalent of a French chef referring to the smell of a Roquefort as putrid, decaying rot. In a fairly crucial plot point, she refers to Bình’s grandmother giving jade earrings as a dowry for his mother. That jangled for me instantly, since in Vietnamese culture it is the groom that is required to give a dowry (or, strictly, the bride-price). She writes of ancestor “worship” thus:After my mother gave birth to me, there were many things she could no longer pray to her father and mother about. They would have disowned her. Then whom would she have left to worship, whose likeness would she have left to reconfigure from memory for her family altar? There is no forgiveness in ancestor worship, only retribution and eternal debt.That is extremely irritating to read. It's an outsider’s description marking mostly a complete failure of understanding. Asians don’t worship ancestors the way Christians worship their God. A closer term would be ancestor veneration. There is no prayer or conversation with ancestors akin to confiding in God and the saints. Incense, food, and other offerings are made by way of both showing respect and to feed them in the afterlife. And the family altar is never never never kept via the woman. That’s why sons are so important. A woman is married out into the husband’s family. She takes HIS ancestors. There were other clunkers like this that kept popping up, but what finally did the novel in for me were Bình’s descriptions (and this is first-person narrative) of things that happened between Alice B Toklas and Gertrude Stein, private conversations that he, a servant who could not speak English, could not possibly have overheard or—having overheard—understood. He describes, for instance, a fight that takes place between Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo before he arrives to work for them, and the ensuing private conversation between Alice and Gertrude:[Leo]…concluded for all to hear that Gertrude’s writing was nothing more than babble…“Babble!” GertrudeStein complained to Miss Toklas. “Lovey, there can only be one,” Miss Toklas whispered, repeating the phrase that would absolutely, mercilessly sever GertrudeStein from her brother Leo, her only one…. Leo wrote a note to his sister, as they had chosen to no longer speak, accusing Miss Toklas of stealing her away from him. When Miss Toklas read this, she laughed, and wrote back, “Your sister gave herself to me.”Okay, Bình doesn’t speak English much less read it, so the only way he would know of the contents of the two letters is if the two of them told him of this. Yes, I can see that happening: the two mistresses confiding this very private event to their cook. Total bollocks! But why include this event then? Does it pertain in any way to Bihn's story or his development as a character? No. It seems to be written in only so that Truong can impart this stunning bit of writerly post-modern wisdom: “How true, I think. A gift or a theft depends on who is holding the pen.” If Monique Truong had wanted to write a fictionalised account about Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas, she should have done just that rather than putting words into the mouth of a badly realised, imperfectly imagined sock puppet who would also come off sounding like a cross between a badly written Hallmark card and a Vietnamese version of Charlie Chan.
It's distinctly a debut novel. You can tell it's written in a state of transition, whether that's from poetry or from short stories to novels. The writing comes and goes in spurts, and no single story strand ever appears long enough to pick out a delicate pattern. It's just a mass of tangled threads at the end. But somehow the underlying fabric remains steady, and you're pulled through the narrative without meaning to be.The narrator, supposedly complex, is more a collection of traits than an individual. It's easy, almost too easy, to slip your conception of yourself in the clothes that hang too loose on Binh (that's what he's called, even if it's not his name). His history becomes yours, his desires become yours, and slowly, your impressions of last Tuesday's dinner creep into the story, and your memories of genius become intertwined with the portrayals in the prose, and your desire for a home becomes more important than anything Truong underscores. Your deficiencies, and your strengths, give Binh a body. He is nameless, transient, easily overpowered by reality. And I'm not certain that this is a bad thing. Unintentionally or intentionally, this sublimation of the individual through the prose echoes the sublimation of the individual through language, which echoes the sublimation of the individual through colonialism. I'm leaning favorably towards this reverberation. The ease by which all these flashing threads dazzle their way across the narrative, never quite settling down or allowing another to take center stage, makes this a fast read. It's a haphazard stream-of-consciousness, and that's not redundant. It's not stream-of-consciousness in that all thoughts just expel themselves onto the page. Binh's thoughts are still sheltered. But we read them, as if we were reading his face, as he remembers desire. The memories integrate themselves into our own consciousness so subtly that we're never sure if we're recalling his home, or ours. It doesn't matter. Neither of us has one.I loved reading this. I'm not sure if I loved digesting it, though. It packs a punch, without touching.
What do You think about The Book Of Salt (2004)?
Binh, the Vietnamese cook working for Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, tells the story of his life and family in Vietnam, and his experience as a ship's cook, and his existence working as a private chef in Paris. It is a story about living and writing one's own history. Binh shares his story with the reader, a combination of fact and fabrication, delicately weaving the fabric of his life so that he can cover himself and survive in a world that has always been hostile and foreign, no matter where he is. Despite communication barriers, he seeks and makes contact with individuals who teach him lessons about life: Blériot teaches him cooking, French sensibilities and class considerations, and his provides him with his induction into sex; shipmate Bao teaches him how to protect himself in the world, and more sex; Stein admirer Lattimore teaches him about race, judgment, attraction, dishonesty and further sex; GertrudeStein and Alice B. Toklas about coupledom and acceptance, even if the family is utterly unconventional, two unappealing little dogs and two women, one of whom exists to serve the other although each needs the other in her own way. But it is his mother who gave him the most important gift of all, that of storytelling, and the way to create the story of his life. "A story is, after all, best when shared, a gift in the truest sense of the word."
—Lcbogota
First off, Monique Truong is a super talented author and I will happily look for more of her books. Unfortunately, The Book of Salt is filled with all three of my Sleepy Read Triggers: religion (Catholicism in particular), cooking minutiae (Babette's Feast, zzzzzzzzz), and magical realism. The three main characters in this historical-fiction are Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas and Binh, the Vietnamese cook they take in at their famed Paris Studio. In addition, there are a ton of other intriguing characters, narrator Binh's family members, former employers, love interests, and various men he meets on boats and bridges (most of whom seemed to be love interests, but I got too confused to say so for certain). None of these people were introduced in a chronological order, their stories were all layered and interrupted, and then re-introduced in a pseudo-rhythmic manner with various constant and repeated refrains - all of which I think was meant to reference GertrudeStein's non-linear style, but which did not really appeal to me personally.
—Emi Bevacqua
It's told from the point of view of a Vietnamese cook who works for Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. The cook is the narrator, and we learn throughout the story his compelling, and devastating, family history and why he left Vietnam.I was only a few pages into the book when I realized that I don't have the voice yet for my historical novel I'm writing. Truong has captured a rich, unique voice in her book that is addictive and haunting. I only have ideas and notes, not that voice that will drive the story. And I know the only way to find it is to keep researching and writing.
—Kate
