The book of salt (original 2003; edition 2003)

"Two ladies wish to find a cook." That's how the narrator of this tale finds his way to Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein's kitchen in Paris in the beginning of the 1930's.

Historically, Stein and Toklas had two Vietnamese cook. Truong picks that idea and runs with it. This cook, exiled from his country, his family, exiled from life tells us of his Madames' lives, the people that surrounds them. This cook is not the most reliable of narrator and Truong does create a character that I found more interesting the second time I read it. He is not ashamed of who he is and ultimately he knows who he is. Who he chooses to be.

Everything hinges on names. On identity. No one is who he or she says she is. Not the cook, his lover, the Sunday man, his father, not even the sailor he met on the boat that took him to France. Not even Stein's manuscript.

The quality of the words, the structure and the period Truong chose to write about for her first novel is well done. It's all in touches of grey. More like 3 3/4 stars. ( )

this is a hard one for me to rate. for some reason i had *extremely* low expectations going in, and i'm sure that affected my reading of this book for at least the first 75 pages or so. i did think that this was not easy to get into, to care at all about, and i really had to work on focusing on actually reading the words. i haven't been this distracted while reading in a long while. at the beginning. once i got past my main issues with the book (the language and the story) i ended up quite liking it.

but the main issues: the language is so incredibly overblown. it's beautiful, don't get me wrong, but so incongruous to the subject. it ends up making no sense that she's writing the way she does about what she's writing about. which makes it hard to read if you're paying attention to both the language and what she's talking about. if you just want to read for the writing or because words can sound pretty on a page, then this is a great book for you to just pick up and open anywhere to appreciate a page or two at a time. and then the story, if you can even call it that. this isn't a book about anything in particular. i actually don't necessarily need lots of things to happen in a book to like it, but i'd like to be able to pinpoint that it was about something.

so i both liked and didn't like this book. the setting isn't something i know anything about (or am much interested in) but did, in the end, find myself enjoying the book for its language. i just wish it had a story worthy of it.

the passages below are examples of the overblown language that at first really annoyed me because they just didn't fit in at all, but that, by the end, i really enjoyed:


"I see there on my fingertips a landscape that would become as familiar to me as the way home."

"If I had your voice, I would never be so terse. I would never stop talking. Why would I if I had a voice like warm fire, not at the crackling and popping early stages but at the moment when all becomes quiet and the embers glow, when heat appears to melt the wood? If I had your voice, I would call out your name from the street, let it pound like a heartbeat at your door, offer it to you as a song. I would never cease." ( )

I heard a lot of great things about this but I didn't finish it. It seemed overly precious and writery. ( )

A very interesting historical fiction novel. Binh is GertrudeStein and Alice Toklas' Vietnamese chef. He tells the tale of his arrival in Paris France, of his life being a chef to 2 powerful women, as well as his family story. How he ends up loving men who do him wrong. How he keeps to himself in a city that only speaks French (which he understands but isn't fluent.)

It is the prose that gets me. Give me a good prose writer and I will keep coming back. Prose about food, love, France, travels etc. I eat that stuff for dinner. ( )

An amazingly beautiful book. Written with poetic and musical notes. The emotions are poignant and bittersweet. A feast that satisfies and drew me in to want more.

If readers like smart, literary and compelling books, this is it. I can't recommend this enough. And I will her other book and others she writes!

Readers will recognize one key theme---of water and its various sources/bodies---how this thread is built and woven throughout the book. Such readers will also relish how the poetry of words works throughout the story. ( )