The Book of Salt

The Book of Salt
Monique Truong
2003
261 pages

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Salt seems to be a common word in book titles this year, so when I saw this sitting on the shelf at a used book store in Solvang, I grabbed it thinking it would be a little bit familiar.

Instead, I found a book set in Paris, a fictional account of the life of a cook to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. I was intrigued since 1) I read The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in high school 2) Stein made an appearance in Midnight in Paris, a film that I loved and 3) Wallace and I had just been talking about Paris.

But now that I’ve read it, I don’t know quite what to make of it.

As I just mentioned, The Book of Salt is the fictional story of Binh, the hired cook of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Binh was raised in colonial Vietnam, and much of his life before Paris is revealed in reminiscences scattered throughout the book…his cruel father, his training as a cook, his eventual firing and disownment (is that a word?) due to a homosexual relationship, and his journey by boat to France. He also reflects on a brief meeting with Ho Chi Minh on a bridge in Paris, and an extended affair with an iridologist with ulterior motives.

However, by the time I got to the end of the book I’d come to suspect that Binh was not the most reliable of narrators. Which made me wonder what the hell had really happened (and not so much the Stein/Toklas/cooking stuff…but everything else…in a fictional sense…I don’t mean if it really happened in real life, since I know it didn’t). There were also some gorgeous passages, but also some about what cooks might really be doing while they cook your food that made me almost quit the book in disgust. (It turns out that Binh is a cutter…although Truong initially seemed to be implying something else entirely…I’ll just say that it involved self-pleasure and people being able to taste the presence of something else in the food and leave it at that.) And the Ho Chi Minh thing was weird, because he’s never called Ho Chi Minh in the book. One would have to know a heck of a lot about Ho to know it was him (or have read some reviews that clued one in).

Now that I’ve rambled on about why I’m not sure what to think, tell me…have you read this one? Would you?