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The Readers Guide
The Book of Salt
By Monique Truong
​It has been a week or so since I finished this book, so some of the details I had to look up, but the sense that it left me with held. In the language of the book more probably it held as a feeling, and perhaps a smell.
It’s a visceral book, with a lot of desire and longing. The biggest platform for this came through food. Love of it by many characters, as well as a bond through it. It is also through the perspective of the main character, Binh, as cook/ chef. To take the example of the title of the book, Binh feels and experiences enough to understand 4 types of salt: kitchen, sweat, tears, or the sea.
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The novel is set roughly from mid 1920s to early/ mid 1930s. Binh first comes to cooking with his mother, both exiled for the main at the back of their house in the kitchen. Then cooking next to his brother in swanky gig in Saigon, Vietnam, then leaving, cooking on boats, then flitting through private houses before landing work with his “Mesdames”, elderly same sex couple Miss Tolkas and GertrudeStein (all always as one word in the mind of Binh).
GertrudeStein as writer, and the couple taken together as a set piece also provide a perspective of desire, longing, as well as what would be considered licentiousness in time and place. They a very open, very lovely, likely pair-bonded American couple in 1930s Paris, set in their ways, and abounding in money, style, charisma, fortitude, attitudes and appetites. Good characters. Also, good foil for Binh, gay Vietnamese man in Paris in his mid-20s. Flights of beautiful phrasing and description coming from his character, who also highlights repeatedly their inability to get by more than just barely in French.
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The writing is beautiful. Again, the way in which things get described. Thoughts, feelings, food. Station in life. Centre of attention vs peripherality to the point of strategic near-invisibility. Weight of expectation and ancestry and ghosts needing to be listened to. All of which hangs heavy on Binh and his family. Binh’s relationship with his mother, and how it unfurls as a story, is a thread that comes to me as being beautifully paced, and poignant. Only a minor thread, but one of many I enjoyed in this book.
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I also enjoyed the flow of the story. Most easy analogy is Pulp Fiction, throwing around the timeline. Chapters of throwback character history to Saigon and his malevolent religious ancestral anchor of a father for pain and self-criticism. These intertwined with chapters working again in kitchens on boats travelling out and away and around the world to eventually land Binh in Paris, where more Chapters are centred. All this threaded through with fights for internal peace, and an interesting end point to finish the novel in that respect.
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There’s much more to say about The Book of Salt. More themes to throw in there as well, like acceptance, how love can be felt, the ability to gift on precious things, such as his mother’s red purse. It’s a book that had the ability to immerse me in it in a really enjoyable way. It’s another book that I would recommend, but also would be happy to say that if you don’t like the feel of how the author writes, you’ll know in the first few chapters. If you do, then this novel immerses in an interesting time, place, and way. I hope you enjoy it too.
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- Chris O’Malley
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The Book Of Salt by Monique Truong - ISBN: 9780618304004