The Book of Salt offered the appeal of a Vietnamese man's point of view, as he makes his way from his home country to France to eventually become the home chef for Gertrude Stein and her lover Alice Toklas. And it did provide that with episodic, and also nicely interlayered chapters about various incidents in Bình's eventful life, with food and kitchens a central focus. Colonialism and Catholicism in Vietnam, queerness in the 1930s (in both France and Vietnam), and how our upbringings haunt us, are some of the themes it explores.

This isn't your typical three-act story. The intent seems to be to gradually add details that form a picture of Bình and the various people and places he lives with and comes across. It's an interesting construction, but it left me rather unsatisfied and wondering what the point was. Bình himself comes across as a cipher, keeping a psychological distance from his own life, including the parts of it that might otherwise elicit strong emotion from either himself or from me. I admired the construction of the machine, but a machine wasn't what I had come to see.

Another issue was the level of bloody events and body horror. Before we get much further, I have trouble with those things, but if I'm otherwise enjoying the story (i.e. City of the Lost, Gideon the Ninth) I can sit through them with only minor difficulty. Here they were depicted with a light hand, and at times added to that edifice of Bình's life that the narrative was constructing. But since I wasn't particularly enjoying the rest of the book, those parts ended up disgusting me and pushing me away without a corresponding reward of enjoyment to justify them.

I got about 2/3 of the way through The Book of Salt and, with very little regret, am DNFing it. I never particularly got in synch with its combination of bloodiness and bloodlessness. It's the first book since I started on Goodreads that I got far enough (more than halfway) to both rate and DNF, so congrats, The Book of Salt!

This book made me want to cook a humongous meal and gorge myself, even though I can't cook my way out of paper bag. Monique Truong's descriptions of food are sensual, but not in the massage kind of way. When she talks about mangoes, it's as though it's a really hot day and you've just plunged your sweaty face into a big bowl of freshly cut mango and shaved ice- that kind of sensual. The book's overarching conceit is also really interesting; its narrator is Anh Binh, a Vietnamese expatriate whose gourmet kitchen ways get him hired as cook to Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas. Binh's struggle with language- trying to get his rudimentary French and English to synch up with his profoundly eloquent inner dialogue- provides food for thought when juxtaposed with Gertrude Stein's cultural arrogance and Western wordplay. The only false note here was Binh's ongoing inner argument with his horrible father, which was cheesy, but not in the nice sharp Dublin cheddar kind of way.

I was nervous upon starting this book because the premise seemed like it could easily slip into gimmick. I wasn’t even sure after the first couple of chapters—I hadn’t yet decided if the undulating and rhythmic language was a thin mask to disguise the gimmick underneath.

But it wasn’t a gimmick. It was wonderful. The novel rewards a little bit of Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas knowledge ahead of time, but it’s certainly unnecessary. The narrator is decidedly the star of the show, spinning a delicate story of his past, weaving through the people, places, and times that shaped him. The prose is environmental and mesmerizing; Binh’s emotional hedging and narratorial frankness contrast one another in much the same way a good tea or custard slowly unravels a host of interlocking flavors on your tongue. (The culinary language in this novel is one of the very best parts.) I would recommend this to someone who wants to be immersed in their next novel, who craves something fascinating but a little bit sleepy.

Good but a bit confusing… beautiful tho. Salt is a metaphor for shame… you heard it here first

Such a beautifully written book. The words were pure poetry (I found myself rereading full chapters just to retaste such lovely words). The plot is pure genius: A fictionalized account of a Vietnamese cook named Binh who works for Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas in the Paris of the 30's. It was clever and sweet and heartbreaking at the same time. The sad life of Binh will stay with me. A new favorite!

Putting aside the author’s confusing writing style and constant switching between current and past events there’s a story of identity, language, love and acceptance to be enjoyed.

Set in the 1920s and 1930s, protagonist and narrator Binh is a young gay Vietnamese cook living in Paris and working as personal chef for Gertrude Stein and her partner, Alice B. Toklas. He had to leave French Indochina due to a failed relationship and his father’s disapproval. He tells of his life and loves in Saigon and Paris, as he observes the interactions between Stein and Toklas.

This story is told in stream-of-consciousness in a non-linear timeline with frequent unannounced shifts. There is not much of a plot here, but there are two stories – one of Binh and his travails, and the other of the Stein-Toklas relationship. The writing is evocative and there are several emotionally moving scenes.

The portrayal of Binh as a voice of a marginalized person works particularly well. Binh knows about French cuisine, and this knowledge of food helps him break through some of the traditional stereotypes he often encounters. I liked the elegant writing and storylines, but the structure did not work all that well for me. I think this is a case where the style occasionally gets in the way. Still, I found it well worth reading.

An epic failure of research and imagination.

The reviewers on GR who have rated this novel highly have generally praised its poetic evocation of love and loss. Okay, I can get that. The novel is an extended dirge of a life spent in unrequited longing as a result of a loveless childhood and an equally loveless adulthood. All of it told in prose like this:

I am at sea again. I am at sea again. Not the choppy, churning body that bashes open a ship's hull like a newborn's soft skull. Yes, a sapphire that a ship's bow skims and grooves. A calming blue expanse between now and Sunday.

That little paragraph is a description of the main character's emotions after learning that his current lover wants to see him again the next weekend.

Here's another sample, this time the main character, Bình, describes love:

Quinces are ripe, GertrudeStein, when they are the yellow of canary wings in midflight. They are ripe when their scent teases you with the snap of green apples and the perfumed embrace of coral roses. But even then quinces remain a fruit, hard and obstinate—useless, GertrudeStein, until they are simmered, coddled for hours above a low, steady flame. Add honey and water and watch their dry, bone-coloured flesh soak up the heat, coating itself in an opulent orange, not of the sunrises that you never see but of the insides of tree-riped papayas, a colour you can taste. To answer your question, GertrudeStein, love is not a bowl of quinces yellowing in a blue and white china bowl, seen but untouched.

If that kind of writing is what you like, then go for it. Unfortunately, that is all you are going to get here. And frankly, that's far too little for me.

It's irritating to be jerked out of a prose induced reverie when a metaphor for the forming of opinions is written thusly:

But once they are formed, ours become the thick, thorny coat of a durian, a covering designed to forestall the odour of rot and decay deep inside.

Now obviously, the writer does not know (a) that among us South-east Asians, durians are called the king of fruit and that odour is highly prized and (b) yes, you can smell that odour even with the thick thorny coat on. No indigenous Vietnamese man would describe the durian thusly. It would be the equivalent of a French chef referring to the smell of a Roquefort as putrid, decaying rot.

In a fairly crucial plot point, she refers to Bình’s grandmother giving jade earrings as a dowry for his mother. That jangled for me instantly, since in Vietnamese culture it is the groom that is required to give a dowry (or, strictly, the bride-price).

She writes of ancestor “worship” thus:

After my mother gave birth to me, there were many things she could no longer pray to her father and mother about. They would have disowned her. Then whom would she have left to worship, whose likeness would she have left to reconfigure from memory for her family altar? There is no forgiveness in ancestor worship, only retribution and eternal debt.

That is extremely irritating to read. It's an outsider’s description marking mostly a complete failure of understanding. Asians don’t worship ancestors the way Christians worship their God. A closer term would be ancestor veneration. There is no prayer or conversation with ancestors akin to confiding in God and the saints. Incense, food, and other offerings are made by way of both showing respect and to feed them in the afterlife. And the family altar is never never never kept via the woman. That’s why sons are so important. A woman is married out into the husband’s family. She takes HIS ancestors.

There were other clunkers like this that kept popping up, but what finally did the novel in for me were Bình’s descriptions (and this is first-person narrative) of things that happened between Alice B Toklas and Gertrude Stein, private conversations that he, a servant who could not speak English, could not possibly have overheard or—having overheard—understood. He describes, for instance, a fight that takes place between Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo before he arrives to work for them, and the ensuing private conversation between Alice and Gertrude:

[Leo]…concluded for all to hear that Gertrude’s writing was nothing more than babble…“Babble!” GertrudeStein complained to Miss Toklas. “Lovey, there can only be one,” Miss Toklas whispered, repeating the phrase that would absolutely, mercilessly sever GertrudeStein from her brother Leo, her only one…. Leo wrote a note to his sister, as they had chosen to no longer speak, accusing Miss Toklas of stealing her away from him. When Miss Toklas read this, she laughed, and wrote back, “Your sister gave herself to me.”

Okay, Bình doesn’t speak English much less read it, so the only way he would know of the contents of the two letters is if the two of them told him of this. Yes, I can see that happening: the two mistresses confiding this very private event to their cook. Total bollocks!

But why include this event then? Does it pertain in any way to Bihn's story or his development as a character? No. It seems to be written in only so that Truong can impart this stunning bit of writerly post-modern wisdom: “How true, I think. A gift or a theft depends on who is holding the pen.” If Monique Truong had wanted to write a fictionalised account about Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas, she should have done just that rather than putting words into the mouth of a badly realised, imperfectly imagined sock puppet who would also come off sounding like a cross between a badly written Hallmark card and a Vietnamese version of Charlie Chan.

bruh i can't do this anymore

The amount of time and research it must have taken to craft this novel, to provide the attention to detail in writing about the different foods, cities/settings, and the characters proves that this book is a feat. Historical fiction is intimidating to me because author's have to strike a balance between reality and imagination. Especially for this book, the author wrote about people (Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Ho Chi Minh) whose lives are probably well researched and established. And yet she is still able to provide – via the perspective of Binh/Bao – a take on them that feels original and believable.

Bonus points for how queer this novel is! Rare to see an author write about queer poc people in history. It was refreshing to read a story which uncovers the stories of those lives that, regardless of what historical erasure tries to have us believe, did in fact exist.

Also, this novel has some incredible prose. I waver between a 3 stars and a 3.5 because sometimes there was an excess amount of detail – I definitely skimmed some passages. But overall, this story is well done.

This book had a lot going on but like a badly executed mayonnaise instead of thick and creamy it did not come together and became a runny mess.
A gay sailor-cook, Vietnam nostalgia, culinary adventures, poetic descriptions, sexual escapades and the most famous salon holders of the 20th century were too many ingredients. My last culinary pun will be that it was not easily digestible even if some of the flavors were delicious.

Once or twice a year, I come across a novel that, albeit flawed, is exactly what I was looking for. The feeling is akin to falling in love, complete with the ache of separation at the end. This is the case of Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt, chosen to fill the prompt #04 of the 2025 PopSugar Reading Challenge, ‘A book with two or more books on the cover or book in the title'.

The Book of Salt is a stunning novel that weaves together historical, personal, and thematic facets into a narrative as layered as the dishes its protagonist prepares in the kitchen of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in 1930s Paris, all rendered in prose so lyrical it often feels like poetry – and, just like poetry, leaves to the reader to make the connections and experience the gaps and blanks.

At its core, this novel is a meditation on displacement and identity. The non-linear narrative of a Vietnamese cook’s personal odyssey from his country of birth to France serves as the narrative lens through which Truong examines the intersections of colonialism, race, class, and sexuality. Born in Vietnam under French colonial rule, the protagonist’s life has been shaped by forces of oppression and power: the hierarchical structures of the colonial world (mirrored even in the kitchens), the relationship with his abusive father, and the alienation he feels as an immigrant in France. His position as a servant to two women who themselves navigate societal marginalization – Stein as a Jewish lesbian and Toklas as her partner – further underscores the complex dynamics of power and belonging.

Truong also captures the clandestine, often heart-breaking nature of same-sex relationships at the time. Bình’s relationships with other men are portrayed with a raw, aching tenderness, but also with great sharpness and self-awareness of someone who is denied dignity on different fronts – as a queer man, a colonized subject, and a servant. The portrayal of Stein and Toklas offers another dimension of LGBTQ+ life in a historical context. It is compelling to observe Stein and Toklas through Bình’s eyes, not as untouchable icons but as flawed, human characters. They are simultaneously benevolent employers and symbols of privilege who, despite their own marginalization, fail to recognize the depth of Bình’s humanity. This nuanced portrayal challenges readers to consider the ways in which individuals navigate power dynamics, even within relationships that might seem progressive or equitable.

Food, in The Book of Salt, is much more than sustenance—it is memory, expression, and survival. Truong’s descriptions of cooking are as evocative as they are symbolic. Salt, in particular, is a recurring motif that encapsulates labour, value, and the tears and sea-taste of Bình’s exile and heartache. The sensory-charged act of cooking becomes an extension of Bình’s personal, cultural, and sexual identity, a way for him to assert agency in a world that seeks to define him and to tell his own story, in a voice filled with humour, bitterness, defiance, and constantly demanding attention.