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The Book of Salt

by prudence on 21-May-2024
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This is by Monique T.D. Truong, a Vietnamese-American author who arrived in the US as a refugee in 1975. Published in 2003, this is her first novel. I came to it via a Five Books list focusing on Hemingway in Paris.

It relates directly to The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, in which Toklas tells us that she and Gertrude Stein had a lively history of employing domestic personnel, which had included some "insecure, unstable, unreliable but thoroughly enjoyable experiences with the Indo-Chinese". Toklas particularly mentions a couple of these employees.

Trac was the one who responded to the invitation quoted in The Book of Salt: "LIVE-IN COOK: Two American ladies wish to retain a cook -- 27 rue de Fleurus. See the concierge." (Trac, or so I read, is a surname commonly found among Vietnamese of Chinese ethnicity.) Toklas describes Trac as "a person with neat little movements and a frank smile"; he extends his limited vocabulary through the use of negatives (a strawberry, for example, was "not a cherry").

Trac leaves their employ for a while, and the Vietnamese who follow in his wake are regarded as more problematic (gambling, drinking, or taking drugs, according to Toklas). The most satisfactory of the successors was Nguyen (this is one of the most common surnames in Viet Nam, and again we don't know his full name). Formerly a servant in the household of the French Governon-General of Indo-China, he "cooked Chinese dishes and French dishes, and to perfection, but objected to preparing a menu with both". She gives a bit more detail: "Gertrude Stein and I thought Nguyen delightfully Chinese. The hamlet of Bilignin was intrigued with an Asiatic in its midst and the farmers were too welcoming. They gave their guest too much wine and he got tipsy... As with all Chinese cooks, his movements were more rapid than the eye could follow... Paris was however too tempting and Nguyen was no longer a possible servant for us."

Trac, meanwhile, had taken up a position as cook on a boat, and goes back to see his family. But he joins the household again after that interlude. He never cooked Sunday dinner for the women, leaving work after lunch, and returning on Monday morning: "He explained that since his return he had been cooking dinner on Sundays at the home of a rich bachelor who frequently gave dinner parties." Eventually he marries a Breton woman called Lucienne, and they open a restaurant.

Creating a composite that draws on both these figures, and inventing a backstory for him, Truong offers us our highly memorable narrator, Binh. Actually, he's not called Binh, but we'll come to that later.

The narrative begins in 1934, when Stein and Toklas, now famous, revisit their native America (where they will meet, inter alia, Dashiell Hammett). Binh has been with them for half a decade by then. From this starting-point, he recalls his life in a series of flashbacks.

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In the garden at their summer residence in Bilignin: Stein, Toklas, photographer George Platt Lynes, and Basket ("the goat-sized poodle", as Binh describes him). Pepe, the chihuahua, does not seem to be included, or maybe he's too small to spot

Binh's "Mesdames" are leaving only temporarily, but it's a year when many Americans are leaving for good, as a result of global economic turmoil: "The Parisians missed the money all right, but no one missed the Americans... When the Americans first began arriving, the Parisians had even felt charitable toward them... But when it became clear that the Americans had no intention of leaving and no intention of ever becoming sober, the Parisians wanted their city back."

Over the course of a series of vertiginous time loops (which are sometimes hard to follow, let's be honest), we learn several things about Binh:

-- The man he calls his father, the "Old Man", was violent and abusive. The demeaning and humiliating way he treats Binh still lingers as a constant, debilitating presence in the young man's ears. This cruelty is all the more offensive when we learn that the man is revered by the Catholic community in Saigon. We later find out he is not Binh's father, and although Binh has referred to him throughout as dead and buried, he has been alive all the time. A letter from Anh Minh, Binh's older brother, at the end of the book, announces he is dying, and their mother is already dead.

-- Binh's mother, married very young (and with no choice) to this cruel man, is perhaps the most tragic figure in the novel. While still in her teens, she has borne four children. After she gives birth to Binh, the last (whose father disappears), she has the midwife perform a hysterectomy. She is wracked by guilt over this. Binh, however, continues to miss the comfort she provided, and even self-harms in an effort to recollect that warm maternal response when he accidentally first cut himself in the kitchen.

-- He has worked in the household of the Governor General, with Anh Minh (who holds a much more senior position, but cannot make it to be chef de cuisine because that job is reserved for French people). From this vantage-point we learn to understand something of the way a colonial household works. Woe betide you, for example, if you try to add local touches to the food... And you must never reveal so much as a trace of pride: "Sometimes even before the servant realizes that he is exhibiting it, Monsieur and Madame have detected it, like something alive underneath their bed."

-- Binh is gay. It is his affair with the new French chef de cuisine that gets him thrown out of the GG's employ. The Frenchman keeps his job, of course... Madame is not a prude, but she is a snob: "She did not care about the relations of two men, just as long as they were of the same social standing and, of course, race." When the reason for Binh's dismissal is reported to his dictatorial father, the young man is cast adrift.

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Binh came from Saigon. Not far away is Phan Thiet

-- Binh gets a job as a ship's cook, and eventually ends up in Paris. It is hard for him to find employment. Language is problematic: "For every coarse, misshapen phrase, for every blundered, dislocated word, I pay a fee." And he is stereotyped, since white people have a limited list of categories to consign him to. He is blanket "Indochinese"; and his appearnce makes them conclude he must be a laborer: "It is this curious mixture of careless disregard and notoriety that makes me long to take my body into a busy Saigon marketplace and lose it in the crush." Very much the plight of the migrant everywhere... In Bilignin, the local people are friendly, but their curiosity borders on the intrusive.

-- Like one of his real-life prototypes, Binh gets a Sunday job. But in Truong's version he becomes the lover of his "Sweet Sunday Man". This is Marcus Lattimore. He's an iridologist, but presents himself as a writer, and is one of Stein's little circle. "Stein writes books," he says, "but they are... unusual, almost not books at all." Lattimore is biracial, but -- like the Ex-Colored Man -- passes himself off as white. Binh is saddened by this: "I hide my body in the back rooms of every house that I have ever been in. You hide away inside your own. Yours is a near replica of your father's, and you are grateful for what it allows you to do, unmolested, for where it allows you to go, undetected. This you tell yourself is the definition of freedom. As for your mother's blood, you are careful not to let it show..." Lattimore wants Binh to "borrow" a Stein manuscript. Reluctantly, he does. Binh can't read, of course, and takes a manuscript at random. It turns out it's a piece about him (what are the chances...?). Lattimore says it's called The Book of Salt, and "Stein captured you, perfectly". The manuscript is never returned, and Lattimore leaves Paris.

-- We catch a glimpse of another Vietnamese in Paris... "I met him, the man on this bridge, in 1927." This man, too, has been a cook. And a teacher. And he has done all sorts of other jobs. He's 37, and he's leaving that night. He tells Binh: "'The French are all right in France.' What he meant, he explained, was that when the French are in their colonies they lose their natural inclination toward fraternity, equality, and liberty. They leave those ideals behind in Mother France, leaving them free to treat us like bastards in the land of our birth." Binh later learns, by spotting a picture in a photographer's studio, that the man's name is Nguyen Ai Quoc. Ho Chi Minh used this pseudonym in Paris, and he did indeed work for a while as a photograph retoucher. Binh wants to buy the picture, but the photographer says it was done using an old method. It's a salt print. It's very expensive...

-- We learn towards the end that Binh changed his name on board ship. He used to be called Bao, but Bao means storm, and there was another young man called Bao on board. Maybe two storms on a ship would bring bad luck, he thinks. Binh means peace... But this confusion means that the little bit of treasure his mother gave him (which Bao took but now wants to return) is still at large.

So this is a very rich portrait, elevating the walk-on figure of the cook in Toklas's account to a position at the very centre of the drama. It's a clever idea.

sunsetbeach

***

We also get an interesting picture of the Stein-Toklas household through Binh's eyes. The concierge has warned him that the two Americans "are a bit, umm, unusual. You should call her by her full name, Gertrude Stein. Always GertrudeStein. Just think of it as one word." We see Stein deciding to cut her hair, reading detective stories, appreciating English all the more because it is not the language of mundane life around her. We see Toklas acting as general factotum, cheerleader, typist, and proofreader: "Miss Toklas has long since made herself indispensable to GertrudeStein. She is as much a guardian of their temple as the solid door to the studio." And the relationship works: "My Mesdames cohabitate in a state of grace. They both love GertrudeStein. Better, they are both IN love with GertrudeStein... GertrudeStein feeds on affection, and Miss Toklas ensures that she never hungers."

He struggles to understand their love for their dogs: "I am not the jealous type. It is just that dogs, or rather Madame and Madame's love relationships with them, are more foreign to me than their language could ever be. As Anh Minh would say, 'Only the rich can afford NOT to eat their animals.'"

Toklas and Stein are depicted as kind -- but a little condescending, entrenched in their sense of racial superiority whether with regard to Binh or Lattimore.

***

Truong's language is often very beautiful. The description of what to do with quinces, for example, is sublime...

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Must eat...

***

The book has been the subject of quite a lot of critical attention.

Naomi Edwards, for example, describes it as "a deeply haunted text". There are many aspects to this, but the maternal haunting is perhaps the most moving: "The ghost of Binh's mother and the blood that connects their stories expose the violence through which patriarchal domination is purchased. Binh and his mother become connected through this blood, through the violence of their exclusion as degraded others."

The novel "stands as a counternarrative to the 'official history of the Lost Generation' and interrogates the ways in which that history is predicated on the invisibility of figures such as Binh". With the Book of Salt, Edwards concludes, "Truong brings something new to the study of melancholia and loss, powerfully repositioning it at the nexus of queer theory, postcoloniality, and Asian diaspora studies."

Y-Dang Troeung, meanwhile, helps to contextualize the story: "While in her critical writing Truong analyzes the power dynamics between Vietnamese American and white American co-writing subjects in the production of Vietnamese American autobiographies in the post-Vietnam War period, in The Book of Salt she enacts and explores the complexities of this co-writing dynamic in a rich and imaginative fictional form." The "gift-theft dichotomy" that has been used to discuss the literary relationship between Stein and Toklas is employed narratively by Truong to problematize the whole question of authorship: "While Stein is clearly presented as having written both texts [The Autobiography and the manuscript called The Book of Salt], her status as a singular and unified author in the traditional philosophical sense is radically called into question." There are so many contrasting pairs here -- Toklas and Stein, Toklas and Binh, Stein and Lattimore -- and all have their differing power equations.

The Book of Salt, Troeung argues, "functions as a self-theorizing text that expands the concerns of Asian American literature into a wider theoretical register (to intersect with issues of postcolonialism) and into a wider geographical register (beyond North America and Asia to include Europe as a site of diasporic Asian American identity formation)". And it's true that Truong very cleverly illustrates the complex hierarchies that form (along the lines of race, class, and sexual orientation) in Viet Nam, France, and -- through its expatriates -- in the US as well.

***

So, I struggled a bit with the time jumps; I sometimes found myself tiring of the highly elliptical, slippery conversations (although I understand than Binh can never entirely come out of his shadows, and therefore matter-of-factness is not something he is ever able to espouse even if he wanted to); and I sometimes felt there was a bit too much going on. But all that is eminently forgiveable in light of the scope and punch of the novel.

fazasoma
Mano Solo (born Emmanuel Cabut) was a popular French musician, who campaigned for equality (the inscription "Les Enfants de FaZa SoMa" on his tomb in Pere Lachaise in Paris -- where Stein and Toklas are also buried -- refers to his support for the indigenous people of Madagascar)