Ease Reading-Find Your Next Favorite Book

Hot Search

The Book of Salt

monique truong

... Show More
Binh, a Vietnamese cook, flees Saigon in 1929, disgracing his family to serve as a galley hand at sea. The taunts of his now-deceased father ringing in his ears, Binh answers an ad for a live-in cook at a Parisian household, and soon finds himself employed by Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas.

Toklas and Stein hold court in their literary salon, for which the devoted yet acerbic Binh serves as chef, and as a keen observer of his "Mesdames" and their distinguished guests. But when the enigmatic literary ladies decide to journey back to America, Binh is faced with a monumental choice: will he, the self-imposed "exile," accompany them to yet another new country, return to his native Vietnam, or make Paris his home?

261 pages, Paperback

First published April 7,2003
Literary awards
stonewall book award, new york public library young lions fiction award, guardian first book award, pen/robert w. bingham prize, lambda literary award, rosenthal family foundation award, asian/pacific american award for literature, 
Places
north carolina, paris, saigon, 

This edition

Format
261 pages, Paperback
Published
June 15, 2004 by Mariner Books
ISBN
9780618446889
ASIN
0618446885
Language
English

More editions

About the author

Profile Image for monique truong

monique truong

... Show More
Born in Saigon, South Vietnam, Monique Truong came to the U.S. as a refugee in 1975. She is a writer based now in Brooklyn, New York. Her award-winning novels are The Sweetest Fruits (Viking Books, 2019), Bitter in the Mouth (Random House, 2010), and the national bestseller The Book of Salt (Houghton Mifflin, 2003). She is the co-editor of Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry & Prose, 25th Anniversary Edition (DVAN Series, Texas Tech University Press, 2023). With fashion designer Thai Nguyen and New York Times bestselling illustrator Dung Ho, Truong is the co-author of Mai's Áo Dài, a children's picture book (Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books, 2025).

A Guggenheim Fellow, U.S.-Japan Creative Artists Fellow in Tokyo, Visiting Writer at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, Princeton University's Hodder Fellow, Kirk Writer-in-Residence at Ages Scott College, Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence at Baruch College (CUNY), and Frank B. Hanes Writer-in-Residence at UNC-Chapel Hill, Truong was most recently awarded a John Gardner Fiction Book Award and a John Dos Passos Prize for Literature. Truong received her BA in Literature from Yale and her JD from Columbia Law School.

Readers also enjoyed

Community Reviews

Rating(4 / 5.0, 100 votes)
5 stars
36(36%)
4 stars
31(31%)
3 stars
33(33%)
2 stars
0(0%)
1 stars
0(0%)
100 reviews All reviews
Profile Image for Kimberly .
Protoblues327
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
... Show More
Mellifluous prose, sweet, savory, tart in turn. Never sparse or half-baked, occasionally overmixed becoming dense. A plot teasingly presented, with certain events told out of order, a sudden burst of the past flavouring the present. A fable, a fantasy, an alternate or imagined history where liberties stretch some facts and possibilities. The novel requires nearly as much effort to consume as it must have taken to produce. Rarely has the labor required of two interwoven occupations - writer and reader - been so apparent. Possibly nearly as many one-liners as Ms Stein herself is known for.
0 0 Reply
Profile Image for Kimberly .
someoneSZ
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
... Show More
I have book-reviewing block, so this is going to be free-association-y rambling.

When I was twelve, I wrote a short story about a witch in the desert for my combined English/History class (yes it was one of those New Age-y things with a funny course name*). It was not a particularly good short story, though I was somewhat proud of the slowly unwinding suspense and the female-centric focus**, if only because after I’d gone about two pages over the page length suggestion and realized I’d need another ten pages to really make a plot arc and so instead ended it rather open-ended on the next page because hey, I’d already demonstrated sufficiently*** that I’d at least retained some knowledge of the rise of Islam during the Middle Ages, Bedouins, and Islamic culture.

Reading The Book of Salt reminded me of this long-forgotten assignment, because, well, The Book of Salt reads a lot like Monique Truong’s college-educated version of said assignment, demonstrating sufficiently her knowledge of the Lost Generation. Troung clearly knows Gertrude Stein’s salon and its visitors well, and observes it with equal measures art hanger-on-ism and pot-shot-taking. My own pet issue shoehorned into my desert setting was young female empowerment, but Truong’s is colonialism and homosexuality, as evidenced my her main character—Binh the Vietnamese cook of Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas.

Admittedly Monique Truong is a much better writer than I was at twelve (or now), but there’s still a overall perfunctory and rambly nature that the results share. The narrative doesn’t really go anywhere beyond its place setting or 20s Vietnam and Paris, and particularly Binh’s journey is less goes anywhere than simply gives context for more historical figures to show up… even when Truong makes obvious attempts at making his story Literary (as with the food descriptions, which disappointingly felt rather sterile and self-conscious rather than the food-porn I was looking forward to).

As a history assignment, an A for The Book of Salt, as literature, a D.

*I mean, why not combine the two most boring subjects into a 3 hour block of drudgery, right? Besides I happen to think Math and History would be a better combination. Or Physics and PE. Or Foreign Language and English.Yeah, I love reading and grammar and hate English classes. Go figure.
** though in retrospect, I could have just been unconsciously aping The Witch of Blackbird Pond
***And hey I got an A-. It was certainly better than my previous year’s “Public Speaking as Mary Queen of Scots” had turned out, (but not as good as my humorous play on feudalism’s labor exploitation starring puppets and human actors).
0 0 Reply
Profile Image for Kimberly .
neko1995
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
... Show More
Onvan : The Book of Salt - Nevisande : Monique Truong - ISBN : 618446885 - ISBN13 : 9780618446889 - Dar 272 Safhe - Saal e Chap : 2003
0 0 Reply
Profile Image for Kimberly .
SSJayso
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
... Show More
I can't say I loved this book, because at times, it was a slog. But there beautiful moments that really shined through, and made the reading experience all the more enjoyable. Bình's story is hard to navigate, not only for the reader, but for himself. From colonial Vietnam, French Indochina, and now living in Paris, he works for the Stein household: Alice Toklas and Gertrude Stein, or in Bình's lexicon, Miss Toklas and GertrudeStein. There's a whole lot to unpack here, as we might say in my class, dealing with power dynamics, [post]colonial subjecthood, transnational queerness, queer desire, the sexual politics of food... so much so that I wrote my midterm paper on this book!

Having read The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein, this book was a really interesting perspective shift. The way Truong inhabits Bình's character, oscillates between various timelines (his childhood, his time working in Indochina, his arrival and working for the Steins, his romantic/sexual escapades, the present) is incredibly impressive and compelling.

Read for FREN 412, Postcolonial Theory and Literature, Spring 2021
0 0 Reply
Profile Image for Kimberly .
hatayo
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
... Show More
i thought this was really beautifully written! excited to discuss in book club! made me hungry!!! made me want to go back to paris!!!!
0 0 Reply
Profile Image for Kimberly .
atomicsmal
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
... Show More
It was very good! But the stream of consciousness style was frustrating for me
0 0 Reply
Profile Image for Kimberly .
Grimsfart
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
... Show More
First off, Monique Truong is a super talented author and I will happily look for more of her books. Unfortunately, The Book of Salt is filled with all three of my Sleepy Read Triggers: religion (Catholicism in particular), cooking minutiae (Babette's Feast, zzzzzzzzz), and magical realism.

The three main characters in this historical-fiction are Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas and Binh, the Vietnamese cook they take in at their famed Paris Studio. In addition, there are a ton of other intriguing characters, narrator Binh's family members, former employers, love interests, and various men he meets on boats and bridges (most of whom seemed to be love interests, but I got too confused to say so for certain). None of these people were introduced in a chronological order, their stories were all layered and interrupted, and then re-introduced in a pseudo-rhythmic manner with various constant and repeated refrains - all of which I think was meant to reference GertrudeStein's non-linear style, but which did not really appeal to me personally.
0 0 Reply
Profile Image for Kimberly .
Undpanzer
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
... Show More
stunning sentences & i love how i gave this to chris only for him to give it back because he loved it so much and wanted me to read it too
0 0 Reply
Leave a Review
You must be logged in to rate and post a review. Register an account to get started.