The Book of Salt

This was a very, very excellent first novel. But certainly a first novel. I can't say there are a ton of books with a more interesting premise; Truong takes a historical tidbit, that Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas had a Vietnamese cook while in Paris, and tells the story of his childhood, immigration, and struggle with his identity (he's gay) while caring for the two most famous lesbians of the decade. The best part of Truong's often sensuous writing is her ability to channel Binh's expressive love of food as a medium through which he can express his feelings, as he struggles to connect with other men (who don't share his native tongue) in first French, and then English. The only part I struggled with was Truong's sometimes confusing switches from one era of Binh's life to another. I'm generally pretty good at handling that in literature, and I don't know if the jumpiness was intended to convey both Binh's unease and nod to Stein's famous writing style, but it doesn't quite work with the overall fluidity of the novel. Still, I'd read more of her work, for sure. This is a good book for anyone who loves food, as well.

I wasn't particularly a fan of this book. There's some real dissonance here (not in a good way), most section that take place in Vietnam draw me in and I get so intrigued by the story at hand. But every time we return to the present, and anything “GertrudeStein” related, I immediately lose interest and I start speed reading until my eyes were just skimming the page, jumping across whole paragraphs if nothing catches my eye or it gets repetitive, which is often, especially the last few chapters. There's also something strange about reading a novel that employs the likenesses of real people that kind of rubs me the wrong way. It feels almost fanfiction-y, if that makes sense.

There were also several sections of the book where I was confused by the narrative hopping. We go from being deep in the main character's head, stream of consciousness style, into whole chapters where we no longer feel like we're in the main character's perspective, and instead we're following the story in retrospective from a seemingly omniscient narrator that knows things Bình shouldn't know. I really love stream of conscious-styled writing, hell Voyage in the Dark was my favourite book last year, and yet this book doesn't feel like it does it justice. It feels too scattered and unnatural. One idea is started very very briefly at the beginning of a chapter, only for the main character to drift into barely related ideas that last pages and pages, possibly even chapters, and when we finally return to the original thought, I feel so disconnected from where we started that I'm lost. And yet, at the same time, things are repeated chapters and chapters apart, making me feel like I'm going crazy because I can't remember if it sounds familiar because I really did read it before or if it's just a deja vu thing. But I went back flipping through the pages, and surely enough, things WERE repeated.

Finally, the dialogue. There isn't much dialogue–and I count that as a blessing because otherwise I wouldn't have been able to finish this book. The author's favourite dialogue inserts are definitely “What?” and “Oh.” They are scattered across nearly all dialogue, sometimes almost back to back, and the worst part is that in all cases, these could have been removed and you wouldn't have ever notice. They do not need to exist so repetitively in this book. Especially because BOTH of these can easily be varied: “Oh...” “Oh!” “Oh?”

There's also no progression. Bình does not change, he begins this book as a victim, and he ends this book as a victim. There's no growing, there's no revelation, there's no considering what to change. It's just a circle. We spin back and forth between Bình thinking back about his life in Vietnam, and then his current life in France with “GertrudeStein.” This book begins with GertrudeStein and ends with GertrudeStein. An ouroboros of a book if I'd ever seen one.

Finally, and this was the last straw. There are many instances of strange, and kind of gross, sentences across this book. The one I remember most vividly (probably because it was within the last few chapters of the book), were the main character reminiscing about his mother's “salty nipples” that he used to suck on when he was a baby. Yes, her salty nipples. I think that sounds like about the right place to end this review.