The Book of Salt by Monique Truong

About The Book of Salt

A lush, fascinating, expansive first novel about exile. New York Times


An irresistible, scrupulously engineered confection that weaves together history, art and human
nature . . . Truong has, after much deliberation, cultivated a veritable feast. Los Angeles
Times


[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 Cook Book that inspired The Book of Salt, a brilliant first novel by acclaimed
Vietnamese American writer Monique Truong.


In Paris, in 1934, Bnh has accompanied his employers, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, to
the train 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? Bnh has 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 live-in cook at the famous apartment at 27 rue de Fleurus. Before
Bnhs decision is revealed, his mesmerizing narrative catapults us back to his youth in French-
colonized Vietnam, his years as a galley hand at sea, and his days turning out fragrant repasts for
the doyennes of the Lost Generation.


Bnh knows far more than the contents of the Steins pantry: he knows their routines and
intimacies, their manipulations and follies. With wry insight, he views Stein and Toklas
ensconced in blissful domesticity. But is Bnhs account reliable? A lost soul, he is a late-night
habitu of the Paris demimonde, an exile and an alien, a man of musings and memories, and,
possibly, lies. Love is the prize that has eluded him, from his family to the men he has sought out
in his far-flung journeys, often at his peril. Intricate, compelling, and witty, the novel weaves in
historical characters, from Stein and Toklas to Paul Robeson and Ho Chi Minh, with remarkable
originality. Flavors, seas, sweat, tears The Book of Salt is an inspired feast of storytelling
riches.

About Monique Truong


Monique Truong is coeditor of the anthology Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry and
Prose. The Book of Salt, her first novel, was inspired by a brief mention of an Indochinese cook
in The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book. Born in Saigon, Truong now lives in New York City. The
Book of Salt won the Bard Fiction Prize and the Barbara Gittings Award in Literature, and was a
finalist for Britains Guardian First Book Award in 2003. Monique is currently a finalist for the
New York Public Librarys Young Lions Award and the Lambda Literary Award.

Questions for Discussion


We hope the following questions will stimulate discussion for reading groups and provide a
deeper understanding of The Book of Salt for every reader.


1. Gertrude Stein thinks it is unfathomably erotic that the food she is about to eat has been
washed, pared, kneaded, touched, by the hands of her lover. How is food and cooking
used as seduction in The Book of Salt? Compare the meals between Gertrude Stein and Alice B.
Toklas with the meals Bnh shares with Sweet Sunday Man and the man on the bridge. How is
the reader also seduced or persuaded by these meals? Have you ever wooed someone with what
you fed them?


2. Bnh says, All my employers provide me with a new moniker, whether they know it or not . .
. Their mispronunciations are endless, an epic poem all their own. How is Bnh lost in
translation in The Book of Salt? His interior monologue is lush and eloquent, but he can speak
only a few words in French and English what is the reader privy to that the other characters
are not? Have you ever lived in a place where you werent able to fully speak your mind?


3. O Magazine said, Salt, whether from kitchen, sweat, tears, or the sea is the secret of this
perfectly rendered book. How is salt used as an ingredient in Bnhs story?


4. What does Gertrude Steins (invented) manuscript, The Book of Salt, have to do with The
Book of Salt? Sweet Sunday Man tells Bnh that Gertrude Steins version captured you
perfectly. Could that be true? How do you imagine it reads?


5. The Book of Salt begins with Bnh waiting for the train that will lead the Steins to America. He
seems to be facing a choice: I thought that fate might have been listening in . . . How did you
expect the story to end? Did you think that Bnh would leave Paris? Where would he go? How
did the ending of the novel surprise you?


6. Bnh says, Love is not a bowl of quinces yellowing in a blue and white china bowl, seen but
untouched. Is love what Bnh is looking for in Paris? He does finally get his much-desired
photograph of Sweet Sunday Man, and Sweet Sunday Man also takes a rare item. How is love
given and taken throughout the story? What are the characters left with? Have you kept (or
stolen) artifacts of a past love?


7. Bnh says, When I am telling the truth, why does it so often sound like a lie? Do you believe
Bnhs stories? What is the importance of truth in The Book of Salt, and what are the
consequences of lies? Do you ever tell stories differently than others remember them?


8. When the Steins vacation outside Paris with Bnh, he says, What you probably do not know,
Gertrude Stein, is that in Bilignin you and Miss Toklas are the only circus act in town. And me, I
am the asiatique, the sideshow freak. How are the Steins and Bnh aligned as outsiders? And
how are they not? What is revealed in the Steins response to Lattimore and Paul Robeson
how is it different from the Bilignin villagers response to Bnh?


9. . . . the Old Mans anger has no respect for geographyeven here, he finds me. Does Bnh
seem shamed by his exile? Does he seem freed? How do we carry the judgment of our
parents? What voices followed you when you first left your family home?


10. Bnh uses the color red often when describing his mother: Red is luck that she had somehow
saved, stored, and squandered on her youngest son. What other meanings does he give to red?
Why does he cut his fingertips? Did Bnhs vision of the gray pigeon in the park change your
understanding of his mother, and of what Bnh left behind in Vietnam?


11. Bnh says of the Steins apartment, This is a temple, not a home. Do you agree? Are you
familiar with the works of Gertrude Stein or Alice B. Toklas? Has The Book of Salt changed the
way you think of them?


12. Who is the scholar-prince? Do you think Bnh ever finds his? Did his mother find hers? How
much do folk and fairy tales shape what we expect from romantic love? Do you have a certain
myth in mind when you think of ever after?

A Conversation with Monique Truong


Q) How did you get the idea to write about the Vietnamese cook who worked for Gertrude
Stein and Alice B. Toklas in Paris?


A) When I was in college, I bought a copy of the Alice B. Toklas Cook Book because I was
curious about Toklass hash brownie recipe. It turned out that the famous recipe was not a Toklas
recipe at all, but one submitted by the artist Brion Gysin in a chapter called Recipes from
Friends. Gysins recipe was actually for a haschich fudge and was for a sort of dried fruit bar
concoction dusted with a bunch of pulverized cannabis sativa. It didnt sound tasty to me,
but I read the rest of the book anyway and found that it was less of a cookbook and more of a
memoir. In a chapter called Servants in France, Toklas wrote about two Indochinese men
who cooked for Toklas and Stein at 27 rue de Fleurus and at their summer house in Bilignin. One
of these cooks responded to an ad placed by Toklas in the newspaper that began Two
Americans ladies wish By this point in the book, I had already fallen for these two women
and for their ability to create an idiosyncratic, idyllic life. When I got to the pages about these
cooks, I was, to say the least, surprised and touched to see a Vietnamese presence and such an
intimate one at that in the lives of these two women. These cooks must have seen everything, I
thought. But in the official history of the Lost Generation, the Paris of Gertrude Stein and Alice
B. Toklas, these Indo-Chinese cooks were just a minor footnote. There could be a personal
epic embedded in that footnote.


Q) Food and flavors and recipes play an important role in The Book of Salt. Do you like to
cook yourself?


A) I cook for pleasure. I cook to experience something new. I cook, like the characters in my
novel, to remind me of where I have been. I always cook or rather I always taste the food first
in my mind. I approach a recipe like a story. I imagine it, sometimes I have a dream about it, then
I go about crafting it.


Q) Like a dream, Bnhs story isnt revealed chonologically. Tell us about the novels
structure, which has a kind of fractured cubist quality.


A) The Book of Salt opens in Paris in October of 1934. Bnh, the Vietnamese cook, has
accompanied his employers, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, to the train station. He seems to
be faced with a decision. Will he go to the United States with his mesdames? Will he return to
his family in Vietnam, or will he continue his life in France, or will he travel to some other place
of his choosing? Before Bnh discloses his current choice, he takes the reader back in time to
his own past choices and those of the women he works for. What led each of them to live far
from the land of their birth? What, if anything, could bring them back home again? The answers
to these questions are found in Bnhs memories, musings, observations, and possibly lies all
of which are continuously asserting and interrupting one another.


Q) What role does language play in this novel of Americans and Asians in France?


A) Bnhs stories are told via his internal voice, one which is far richer, far more agile in fact,
it is a stark contrast to the voice that comes out of his mouth. Bnh is a man living in a land,
working for employers whose languages are foreign to him. He struggles with their words, and
they win the confrontation every time. Limited and silenced, Bnh has only his memory and his
imagination to keep him company. In the last chapter of the novel, the story returns to the train
station, where the reader is in essence asked to make the same decision as Bnh. Whether they
would emerge from Bnhs life triumphant or in despair; whether they would be pulled together
or asunder by the competing stories of Bnhs past, present, and future?


Q) You were born in Vietnam and came to the United States in 1975 as a refugee. Did that
experience play a role in shaping this novel?


A) I was six years old when my mother and I left Vietnam in April of 1975. It was supposed to
be just a precautionary measure, a temporary solution to keep us safe from the nightly bombings.
My father, who was a high-level executive for an international oil company, stayed behind at
their behest. Later that month, when Saigon fell to the communist forces, my father left on a boat
for the South China Sea, the same sea that my mother and I were lucky enough to have flown
over in an airplane just weeks before. The departure, the loss of home, that act of refuge-seeking,
have everything to do with the themes playing themselves out in The Book of Salt. There are no
military conflicts in my novel, there are no soldiers, there are no weapons. I suppose it is no
coincidence that the first long-distance flight of my imagination as a writer would take me to a
time in history when Vietnam was more or less at peace. When you are a child of wartime, peace
is the all-consuming fantasy. Also, I think as a child of wartime, one of the questions that stays
with me and that Ive tried to answer for myself by writing this novel is what if there was not a
war, what then would make a person leave the land of their birth behind?


Q) You have a degree from Columbia Law School and you practiced at a big New York
firm, specializing in intellectual property. Are you still practicing law?


A) Thankfully, no.


Q) What made you decide to write full-time?


A) The Book of Salt began as a short story called Seeds, which I wrote in 1997. I had
graduated from college, worked for two years as a paralegal, gone to law school, and was
practicing intellectual property law in New York City by then. I had written fiction in college
and still thought of myself as a writer, even though I hadnt written any fiction since graduating
in 1990. I began to write again because I was coediting Watermark: An Anthology of Vietnamese
American Poetry and Prose.


Q) Why had you gone into law when you always thought of yourself as a writer?


A) I was a coward. My grandfather was a writer back in Vietnam, but besides him I didnt know
any other writers. I didnt know how to go about creating a writing life for myself. I had no road
maps, and I had a bad sense of direction to begin with. I thought that if I went down that path, I
would end up at the welfare office.


Q) Why did you choose the title The Book of Salt?


A) Salt in food, sweat, tears, and the sea is found throughout the novel. The word salary
comes from the word salt, so salt is another way of saying labor, worth, value. For me, the title is
also a nod toward the biblical connotation of salt, in particular to the turning of Lots wife into a
pillar of salt for looking back at her home, the city of Sodom. That story says to me that the
Catholic God, whom the cook is so wary of, not only disapproves of the activities of the
Sodomites but also of nostalgia. Bnh is a practitioner of both. In the novel, there is an
unpublished manuscript by Gertrude Stein with the same name, which plays a significant role in
Bnhs relationship with his American lover, Sweet Sunday Man.


Q) Is there really a manuscript by Stein entitled The Book of Salt?


A) No, I made that up. In the novel, Bnh claims that Steins The Book of Salt is about him.
Stein has certainly written about cooks and servants. In Portraits and Prayers, for instance, there
is a piece called B. B. or the Birthplace of Bonnes about all the women from Brittany who had
worked in the Stein and Toklas household. Also, two of the lives in Steins Three Lives were
servants. So, it does not seem improbable to me that Stein could have devoted a few words to a
cook like Bnh.


Q) There is a character in the novel that Bnh refers to as the man on the bridge until he
finds out that his name is Nguyen Ai Quoc. Isnt that one of Ho Chi Minhs pseudonyms?


A) Yes. Someone told me that he had been a cook in France. It turned out that he was an
assistant cook at the pie bakery of Londons Carlton Hotel, whose kitchen at that time was under
the supervision of the legendary French chef Auguste Escoffier. As a young man, he had left
Vietnam by working as a mess boy on a French ocean liner going from Saigon to Marseilles. I
decided that my cook, Bnh, would take a similar route. Many of Bnhs experiences on the
fictional freighter Niobe were based on or inspired by the more well-documented experiences of
Ba, as he called himself then, on the Latouche Treville. Nguyen Ai Quocs travels out of
Vietnam began in 1911, and they took him to Dakar, Brooklyn, London, Paris, and many other
port cities around the world. From 1917 to 1923 he lived in Paris. Sometime in the summer of
1923, he left Paris for Moscow to begin his full-time education and activity as a revolutionary.


Q) Why include Ho Chi Minh in your novel?


A) I think of the character in The Book of Salt as a fictional Nguyen Ai Quoc as opposed to a
fictional Ho Chi Minh. As Nguyen Ai Quoc, he was a young man living in Paris who read
Shakespeare and Dickens in the original English, who wrote plays and newspaper articles, who
earned money as a painter of fake Chinese souvenirs, a photographers assistant.


Bnh meets him on a bridge over the Seine. They share a meal, their longing for a home, their
thoughts about the French, among a number of other significant things, all in the course of a few
short hours. But a question that the man on the bridge asks of Bnh stays with him for much
longer: What keeps you here?

For Further Reading


The following titles may be of interest to readers who enjoyed The Book of Salt.

Becoming Madame Mao by Anchee Min

The Woman Who Knew Gandhi by Keith Heller

La Tour Dreams of the Wolf Girl by David Huddle

Grass Roof, Tin Roof by Dao Strom