Truong has wisely resisted two temptations: to write the book in rose-is-a-rose Steinese and to round up the usual Stein entourage of Hemingway, Picasso and company ... The book is about exile: both Binh's aching distance from his native Saigon and his two Mesdames' cheerful distance from America ... Binh's Saigon -- Monique Truong's birthplace and childhood home -- is evoked here with piercing yearning and authenticity ... Nothing in this distinctive novel feels secondhand. Binh is the key that has unlocked something in Truong, less researched than retrieved ... Plot here is minimal and elusive. The gradual unfolding of secrets -- of sexuality, race and family origin -- is more insistent than any particular conflict ... Against the odds, she has made unsettling art from precisely such exotic cuttings and transplantings.
The Book of Salt travels between past and present, Vietnam and France, and we soon discover that the stories Binh tells are subject to his revisions. Truong is playing with narrative confusion, but she wisely circles back to Binh's sharp, beautifully rendered observations of the mesdames and their household at 27 rue de Fleurus ... As Truong's narration jumps around in time, so most of the characters float between worlds and identities, shrouded in secrets ... Truong is taking on a lot here, with ideas of exile, storytelling and truth all filtered through metaphors of food ... There are a few moments when she lapses into an overly stylized prose, perhaps inevitable given the amount of self-conscious questioning of truth and unreliable narration. Still, the writing is lyrical and powerful, most notably the sections on Binh's mother.
Binh tells his story in elliptical, elusive flashbacks, revealing himself to be both endearingly naive and savvy enough to cover his tracks when necessary ... As Binh’s disorienting story wavers from present to past, his voice shifts from wry observer to that of a lost and desperate soul ... The Book of Salt offers a servant’s perspective on an uneasy relationship with artists ... Yet Truong’s novel is infinitely more expansive and multilayered. Binh is deeply troubled (clearly more so as the novel goes on), yet he is oddly noble, determined to find a life of dignity for himself. That the account of his life story ultimately proves unreliable makes Binh no less memorable or compelling a figure. And it makes Truong’s debut seem more impressive and ambitious than most contemporary first works of fiction, which often read like thinly fictionalized memoirs.
With dazzling sweep and a sturdy sense of purpose, first-time novelist Monique Truong eyes Stein and her companion, Alice B. Toklas, through the shielded vision of their live-in cook in The Book Of Salt, a dreamily immersive novel that strains thoughts on food and language through a story about roots, faith, and the beguiling rewards of escape ... Truong winds a virtuosic path through the book's murky impasses, writing with a meditative hum that proves as wide-eyed as it is solemn. The same qualities carry through to her characterizations of Stein and Toklas, a couple whose codependence strikes Binh as endearing and absurd.
In an elegant if rambling style somewhat reminiscent of Stein herself, Truong relates Binh's rise from obscurity to semi-obscurity ... In its celebration of gustatory delights and their use as metaphors for human life, Truong's novel belongs in the company of such books as Joanne Harris' Chocolat ... Truong capably evokes Binh's disparate worlds, and her depiction of the eccentric, punctilious and almost intolerably narcissistic American ladies rings true. Somewhat less convincing is her ambitious persona as a gay man: one often hears Truong, not Binh, when the writing soars into sentimentality or sensuality.
Aside from the topical subjects of exile, colonialism, homosexuality, food politics and art, how many people have the insight and brio to follow a minor character in a major literary life and craft a novel from the margins? ... Truong’s impressionistic, sensual language resonates on so many levels, often reaching 'the point at which all things melt in the mouth' ... But for all the novel’s lush sensuality, it is the interior life of Binh, torn between cultures and languages, that is rife with flavor and possibility. His is a bittersweet life, marked by 'the salt of tears, sweat, blood and the sea' ... With the eye of a painter, the palate of a chef and the heart of a poet, Truong’s terrific first novel has taken us into the world of this invisible man and made it matter.
In a dazzling if sometimes daunting debut, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas’s Vietnamese cook tells his story—and theirs ... We learn his history in bits and pieces, often through meandering riffs that may challenge readers’ patience ... The novel is in fact largely a meditation on the senses and sensuality, and the salt of the title has different sources (table, sea, tears, sweat) that create different sensations and different resonances. Truong caresses each image and each shifting sensation, forming whole scenes around a taste, color, or touch, language being her other second theme ... A tour de force. Truong should take literate America by storm.
A mesmerizing narrative voice, an insider's view of a fabled literary household and the slow revelation of heartbreaking secrets contribute to the visceral impact of this first novel ... The tone throughout is poignant, lightened by Bình's subversive wit; for all his bitterness and resentment, he is a captivating narrator, as adept at describing Stein's literary salon as the contents of Toklas's kitchen ... The narrative rings with emotional authenticity ... But it is her intuitive understanding of the condition of exile—'the pure, sea salt sadness of the outcast'—that infuses her novel with richness and beauty.
