The Book of Salt
Monique Truong
Quick Thoughts:
I wish I had written this book. I cannot express this enough. This book has much to teach me about writing, and reading. I have three other books that this is true of: Beloved by Toni Morrison, The Law of Dreams by Peter Behrens, and The True Story of Hansel and Gretel by Louise Murphy. The Book of Salt is an impeccable book. The gift of this book is its narrator, Binh, a young man expelled from his position in a grand house, and from his father's house, for nothing more than bringing shame on the household for loving a man. He travels from Vietnam to France, a stranger in a strange land, cooks his way through a string of households, until he answers an ad placed by two American ladies, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Tolkas. From the vantage point of his kitchen, the reader is witness to these two luminaries, their salons, the steady stream of acolytes, but it is Binh that truly fascinates. Truong's beautiful prose limns the ordinary life of Vietnamese domestic cook Binh, with layers of gold leaf. His life, his sadness, his yearning for love that dare not speak its name, to be at home in a city, a country not his own, to feel, even blade sharp pain, to be drawn momentarily into the intimate circle of his Madame and Madame, is far more interesting than the larger than life genius of "that typewriter in a dress", Gertrude Stein, to quote poet Lynn Emmanuel from the poem Inside Gertrude Stein. I did not want this book to end. I had the urge after I finished the last sentence to turn to the first, and begin again. I think you will too.
First Sentence:
"Of that day I have two photographs and, of course, my memories."
Favorite Parts:
"I sniffed the envelope before opening it. It smelled of a faraway city, pungent with anticipation fro rain. If my Mesdames had not been in the room, I would have tasted it with my tongue. I was certain to find the familiar sting of salt, but what I needed to know was what kind: kitchen, sweat, tears or the sea." p. 5
"Desperation was extending its stay...An evil little wish had come true. The Parisians missed the money all right, but no one missed the Americans." p. 6
"...the vocabulary of servitude is not built upon my knowledge of foreign words, but rather on my ability to swallow them." p. 13
"I am forced into an avid, adoring courtship with the boulevards of this city. I must admit that in truly desperate times, my intimate knowledge of the city has saved me. Paris is a Madam with a heart." p. 15
"Wielding my words like a rusty kitchen knife, I can ask for, reject, and ultimately locate that precise specimen that will grace tonight's pot." p. 18
"I have sold myself in exchange for less. Under their gentle guidance, their velvet questions, even I can disgorge enough pathos and cheap souvenir tragedies to sustain them...I forget that there will be days when it is I who will have the craving, the red, raw need to expose all my neglected, unkempt days. And forget that I will wait, like a supplicant at the temple's gate, because all the rooms of the house are somber and silent." p. 20
"This is a temple, not a home." p. 22
"...these women are to be feared because they make a mockery out of the marriage union, hat their children's preordained faces proclaim too loudly that the man is irrelevant, that maybe he is not needed at all." p. 24
"As I slipped into the South China Sea, as water erased the shoreline, absolving it of my sins, I began to believe that conflict and strife were landlocked. Too sweat-stained and cumbersome for sea travel..." --
"Miss Toklas...is a pagan who secretly years for High Mass." p. 27
"The modern world is without limits, she tells Miss Toklas, so the modern story must accommodate the possibilities--a road where she can get lost if she so chooses or go slow and touch each blade of grass." p. 28
"Paper-white narcissus, one hundred bulbs in shallow pools of moistened pebbles, their roots exposed, clinging, pale anchors steadying the blooms as they angle toward the sun. The windows are never completely closed because the sweet powdery scent would be unbearable. In those corners where sunlight is an unfulfilled promise, there are bowls of varying sizes holding hydrangea clusters, dried, the color of barely brewed tea. With no water to weigh them down, the blooms rattle against their china vessels whenever a draft sidles through the garret. The petals scraping lightly against the bone-enriched walls sing the song of a rainfall. I choose to remember these things only. The rest I will discard." p. 36
"I am acutely aware when I am being watched, a sensitivity born from absence, a grain of salt on the tongue of a man who has tasted only bitter." p. 37
"To answer your question, GertrudeStein, love is not a bowl of quinces yellowing in a blue and white china bowl, seen but untouched." p. 40
"The sight of my brother sitting, bareheaded, stilled by disappointment, taught me lessons he never intended." p. 60
"By the time sorrow shows itself in the hands, it is deep and infinite, no longer a wash but an out and out drowning." --
"A little lie makes for a good story." p. 62
"...there is no narrative in sex, in good sex that is. There is no beginning and there is no end, just the rub, the sting, the tickle, the white light of the here and now." p. 63
"We come into their homes with our skills and our bodies, the latter a host for all the vermin and parasites that we have encountered along the way." p. 64
"He knew that to be a good cook I had to first envision the possibilities. I had to close my eyes and see and taste what was not there. I had to dream and discern it all on my tongue." p. 66
"There is a fine line between a cook and a murderer." p. 67
"A kiss freely given is a wonder to watch, even if it is being seen through the slit of a partially closed door." p. 71
"...sometimes when it is deep enough, there is an ache that fools my heart." p. 74
"there is a development, a rise and fall, upon which its salinity becomes apparent, deepens, and then disappears. Think of it as a kiss in the mouth." p. 98
"He, like me, thought that he would be a writer or a scholar someday, but after he traveled the world, life gave him something more practical to do." 99
"Although we strap time to our wrists, stuff it into our pockets, hang it on our walls, a perpetually moving picture for every room of the house, it can still run away, elude and evade, and show itself again only when there are minutes remaining and there is nothing left to do except wait till there are none." p. 100
"And like all servants he had to take solace from wealth and pleasure, even if they were not his own." p. 108
"Men, believe me, are fragile in unexpected ways." p. 125
"The French are all right in France."...he explained, was that when the French are in their colonies they lose their natural inclination toward fraternity, equality, and liberty. They leave those ideals behind in Mother France, leaving them free to treat us like bastards in the land of our birth." p. 137
"It is the recognition that in the darkest streets of the city there is another body like mine, and that it means me no harm." p. 141
"Blood makes me a man." p. 142
"Value, I have heard, is how it all begins. From there, it can deepen into worth, flow into affection, and artery its way toward the muscles of the heart." p. 150-151
"Language is a house with a host of doors, and I am too often uninvited and without the keys." p. 155
"My Madame knows that intrigue, like salt, is best if it is their from the beginning." p. 177
"...the tongues is the organ of truth." p.178
"The first bite is a revelation of flavors, infused and deep. The second bite is a reminder of why we kill and eat the young. The third allows the brain back into the fray to ask, But how is it possible?" p. 179
"GertrudeStein proudly identified their automobile as the mechanized muse. every person and everything has its own throb and rhythm. The automobile...just helps to amplify them as it zooms on by." p. 182
"Wives are never geniuses. Geniuses are never wives." p. 184
"Salt enhances the sweetness." p. 185
"...what do I have to lose? The answer to this question, believe me, depends on what the gambler believes is fixed and constant in his life. What will always be there? What will never change?...Another way of thinking about it is: What does the gambler have faith in?" p. 195
"Salt is an ingredient to be considered and carefully weighed like all others." p. 212
"Winter waited for me on the shores of this country like a vengeful dowager, incensed and cold-shouldered." p. 217
"No one wants to stand to close to desperation." . 220
"...you are a sudden crush of gray. Silk flows from your body, softness that he had taken away. In the city of my birth, you keep the promise we made to each other. We swore not to die on the kitchen floor. We swore not to die under the eaves of his house." p. 221
"Words, my Sweet Sunday Man, do not have twins in every language. Sometimes they have only distant cousins, and sometimes they pretend that they are not even related." p. 223
"My life is moving too quickly, and as always i believe that being closer to the ground will slow it down." p. 227
"In the hopes of easing my sorrow, she had taken the form of a pigeon, a city-worn bird who was passing away. Death believe me, never comes to us first in words." p. 230
"GertrudeStein is a writer, not a reader. ...Writers, I suspect, are in this way like cooks. We practice a craft whose value increases tenfold once its yield is shared and consumed." p. 235-236
"...it is the heart that tells us what is and is not there." --
"Blue is the last bit of beauty that this animal has left to share, before a knife finds its soft underbelly and guts it...blue is the color of all that remains." p.
238
"..."sweet." "Sour" and "bitter"..."salt"...In any language, these four words repeated, emphasized with a shake or a nod, are invaluable to me in the kitchen." p. 241
"Sorrow, even when tempered by sweat and toil into a whisper weight of gold, is still sorrow." p. 242
"I got up and slowly walked my hunger around." p. 244
"I needed a ship that would go out to sea because there the water is deep, deeper than the hemmed-in rivers that I could easily reach by foot. I wanted the deepest water because i wanted to slip into it and allow the moon's reflection to swallow me whole." p. 250
"Wishes, as I have always known, can be cruel in the terms and conditions of their fulfillment." p. 252
"I measured the distance down to the water,...thought about how all the rivers of the world desire to flow to the seas." p. 257
"A "memory" was for me another way of saying a "story." A "story" was another way of saying a "gift." The man on the bridge was a memory, he was a story, he was a gift. Paris gave him to me." p. 258
"For a traveler, it is sometimes necessary to make the world small on purpose. It is the only way to st0p migrating and find a new home." --
"When I got off the train, I was dressed all in white and without the customary hat, and they, in their own way, understood that that meant that I was in mourning." p. 259
"My eyes are closed because thinking, for me, is sometimes aided by the dark." p. 261
"In the dark, I see you smile. I look up instinctually, as if someone has called my name." --
Author Bio:
Monique Truong was born in Saigon in 1968 and moved to the United States at age six. She graduated from Yale University and the Columbia University School of Law, going on to specialize in intellectual property. Truong coedited the anthology Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry and Prose. Her first novel,The Book of Salt, a national bestseller, has been awarded the 2003 Bard Fiction Prize, the Stonewall Book Award-Barbara Gittings Literature Award, and the Young Lions Fiction Award, among other honors. Granting Truong an Award of Excellence, the Vietnamese American Studies Center at San Francisco State University called her "a pioneer in the field, as an academic, an advocate, and an artist." Truong now lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Best Reviews:
Powell's: Includes a list of review excerpts from a variety of respected sources.
