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A review by alundeberg
The Book of Salt by Monique Truong
3.0
I was pretty stoked when while researching novels by Vietnamese authors that I came across Monique Truong's The Book of Salt, a novel set in Paris with a Vietnamese narrator who is Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas's cook. Vietnam? Paris? Stein? 1930's? Absolutely, yes please.
That said, I really wanted to like this book. Identity, marginalization, and societal hypocrisy are the dominant themes, and Truong includes just about every iteration of them and it feels heavy-handed. The story follows Binh, a gay man who is a Vietnamese immigrant in Paris who works as a cook. In Vietnam, he doesn't fit in in Vietnam, despite the help of his wiser older brother who helps him get a job with the French Governor-General in Saigon. Working for the imperialist power and being a gay man, he is a second-class citizen in his own country and home. For reasons one may imagine, he has to leave and makes his way to Paris. There he meets Stein, whose own story mirrors his own: an ex-pat gay woman with an older brother and who did not fit in at home. Stein has the benefit of being an American, and this just further shows how Binh is marginalized as she never attempts to learn how to say his name correctly. Just in case the reader doesn't understand the marginalization in society, Binh's lover in Paris is African-American who passes as white. There are other examples, but that would be spoiling the book to give them. It was fun at first to piece together how Truong develops the themes, but then it got tiring: I GET IT.
There is also a lot of evocative language used, but after awhile, I lost track of what it was supposed to evoke. It felt pseudo-philosophical, trying to make greater points about life, but not saying much of anything. There were passages like this frequently and they became tiresome. It is an interesting premise, but the execution was not strong.
That said, I really wanted to like this book. Identity, marginalization, and societal hypocrisy are the dominant themes, and Truong includes just about every iteration of them and it feels heavy-handed. The story follows Binh, a gay man who is a Vietnamese immigrant in Paris who works as a cook. In Vietnam, he doesn't fit in in Vietnam, despite the help of his wiser older brother who helps him get a job with the French Governor-General in Saigon. Working for the imperialist power and being a gay man, he is a second-class citizen in his own country and home. For reasons one may imagine, he has to leave and makes his way to Paris. There he meets Stein, whose own story mirrors his own: an ex-pat gay woman with an older brother and who did not fit in at home. Stein has the benefit of being an American, and this just further shows how Binh is marginalized as she never attempts to learn how to say his name correctly. Just in case the reader doesn't understand the marginalization in society, Binh's lover in Paris is African-American who passes as white. There are other examples, but that would be spoiling the book to give them. It was fun at first to piece together how Truong develops the themes, but then it got tiring: I GET IT.
There is also a lot of evocative language used, but after awhile, I lost track of what it was supposed to evoke. It felt pseudo-philosophical, trying to make greater points about life, but not saying much of anything. There were passages like this frequently and they became tiresome. It is an interesting premise, but the execution was not strong.