The Book Of Salt - Hardcover

Truong, Monique

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0701175222 ISBN 13: 9780701175221

Publisher: Chatto & Windus, 2003

Synopsis

"[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.

About this title

Review:

"It is beautifully written, a cooking up of love and self to feed the devouring appetites of Gerturde Stein and Alice B. Toklas that is nothing less than a masterpiece of delicate and -naturally- existentialist hedonism." (Andro Linklater The Spectator)

"The Book of Salt reminded me of how thrilling really fine writing can be, and how rarely one sees it" (Sarah Waters)

From the Publisher:

A sharply subtle literary feast: the Vietnamese cook to Gertrude Stein and Alice B.Toklas reveals his fascinating story in a compelling novel that takes the reader on a strange journey from Indo China to Paris in the ‘30s

About this edition

• Publisher: Chatto & Windus
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0701175222
• ISBN 13: 9780701175221
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 272