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by Michael Ondaatje
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In the 1920s Binh, a young Vietnamese boy, sets sail from Saigon to seek his fortune in France. He leaves behind a family torn by grief and shame, and finds a new life in Paris as a cook for the infamous writer Gertrude Stein and her lover, Alice B Toklas. Thus begins this heartfelt study of loss, exile and the longings of the dispossessed. The narrative shifts between Stein's eccentric household, Binh's isolated and secretive private life in Paris, and his ruminations on his fraught and bitter relationship with his father. As we move from one location to another and back again, the story of Binh's troubled family and his own precarious position in his adopted country slowly unfolds. Although an outsider in the literary circles of his employers, he has vowed not to return to his ancestral home in Saigon which remains, after years of exile, the source of all his inspiration and all his pain. But his older brother has written demanding he return, and Binh is once again torn between the need for freedom and the call of duty. Monique Truong's first novel is a wistful, introspective and beautifully written work. She's tackled some big themes for a first-timer, and developed them with a sensitivity and conviction that mark her as a writer of real talent. Her gentle, retrospective narrative could easily dissolve into repetitive longings and cliched tracts on alienation, yet it doesn't. This is not an author who will broach the self-indulgent or sentimental. Each page is suffused with the pain of exclusion and the hope of belonging, the need for intimacy and the value of keeping one's own counsel. Every relationship's precise balance and intricate power play is depicted faithfully, with a sometimes unnerving clarity. A remarkable first novel from a promising young writer. (Kirkus UK)
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"[He] came to us through an advertisement that I had in desperation put in the newspaper. It began captivatingly for those days: 'Two American ladies wish...' " It was these lines in The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook that inspired The Book of Salt, a brilliant first novel by a talented young Vietnamese American writer about the taste of exile. Paris, 1934, 'Thin Bin', as they call him, has accompanied his employers, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, to the station for their departure to America. His own destination is unclear: will he go with 'the Steins', stay in France, or return to his native Vietnam? Binh fled his homeland in disgrace, leaving behind his malevolent charlatan of a father and his self-sacrificing mother. For five years, he has been the personal cook at the famous apartment on the rue de Fleurus. Before Binh's decision is revealed, we are catapulted back to his youth in French-colonized Indo China, where he learned to cook in the embassy kitchens, his years as a galley hand at sea, and his days turning out fragrant repasts for the doyennes of the Lost Generation. Binh knows far more than what the Steins eat: he knows their routines and intimacies, their food and follies. With wry insight, we see Stein and Toklas ensconced in rueful domesticity. But is Binh's account reliable? A lost soul, he is a late-night habitue of the Paris demi-monde, an exile and an alien, a man of musings, memories, and possibly lies, susceptible to drink and occasional self-mutilation with a kitchen knife...Love is the prize that has eluded him, from his family to the men he has sought out in his farflung journeys, often at his peril and more recently with risk to Stein's manuscript notebooks. Intricate, compelling, and witty, the novel weaves in historical characters, from Stein and Toklas to Paul Robeson and Ho Chi Minh, with remarkable originality. Tastes, oceans, sweat, tears -- The Book of Salt is an inspired novel about food and exile, love and betrayal.
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