A delightful historical novel. Bihn, from Vietnam, is an haute cuisine cook who's hired by Alice B. Toklas as a live in chef for her and Gertrude Stein. The delight is twofold. There's the banter between the women and the mouth watering descriptions of food.

i enjoyed the first one hundred pages of this but then it became a chore. there were huge blocks of prose without any breaks which i was struggling to get through and found myself getting bored. this is the story of a gay man who travels from his home country of vietnam to france to cook for alice b toklas and gertrude stein. the biggest problem i had was that the narrative was so hard to distinguish where and when these events were happening. the main character had an abusive relationship with his father and sometimes he would hear his voice but then other times he would really be there because the story was looking backwards. i also thought the relationships that the main character had were very 2d and although the writing was beautiful i dont think this book was for me :(

An ambitious book that ultimately missed the mark for me. The writing is gorgeous, so much so that I wanted to luxuriate in it. Unfortunately, the structure of the book is very disjointed and hard to follow. Truong skips all over the place and never really settles on a cohesive narrative for her book. That's a real shame as there is some powerful stuff in here. I also wanted the book to focus a bit more on the main character's journey and his sexuality. It felt very glossed over and it felt like he was a bit character in the story so that Toklas and Stein could have more attention. I appreciated what this book was doing even as I found myself frustrated and slightly bored by it. It's not a bad book at all. It just needed a bit more structure and a coherent narrative.

A very poetic novel with a winding storytelling stream-of-consciousness.

Poético hasta la náusea, no tiene argumento de ningún tipo, el protagonista es un “pobre de mi” y por si fuera poco está repleto de inexactitudes culturales (de las cuales me he dado cuenta yo, que de Vietnam sé más bien poco…).

A novel full of distinct ideas and images that never quite came together. Monique Truong's debut book centers on Binh, a gay Vietnamese cook who flees Saigon in 1929 to work as a galley hand at sea. He narrates his journey while later employed as a live-in cook for Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, two esteemed women who operate a literary salon in Paris. When the two women plan a return trip to America, Binh must confront the ghosts of his family and his exile.

The Book of Salt included a lot of cool phrases and poetic images about sexuality, race, gender, abuse, and more. I got lost - in a good way - in some of Truong's passages; they would often flow from thought to metaphor to sensation and beyond. Her use of Binh's overt introspection to isolate minute details and string them together impressed me

However, I felt an overwhelming lack of direction in The Book of Salt. Binh's mind wanders from place to time to memory to incident without any solid grounding; the impact of his journey decreased because of how Truong did not give his internal rumination enough structure. While Binh's desire for belonging and his curiosity about Stein and Toklas pulsated from the pages of the novel, his intense strands of emotion never merged into a single thread for readers to hold onto and follow.

Overall, a unique book I would recommend to those intrigued by its synopsis, because it does touch on several fascinating subjects. While Truong both hit and miss with The Book of Salt, I would still give another book of hers a shot, if not just for her poetic prose.

It's distinctly a debut novel. You can tell it's written in a state of transition, whether that's from poetry or from short stories to novels. The writing comes and goes in spurts, and no single story strand ever appears long enough to pick out a delicate pattern. It's just a mass of tangled threads at the end. But somehow the underlying fabric remains steady, and you're pulled through the narrative without meaning to be.

The narrator, supposedly complex, is more a collection of traits than an individual. It's easy, almost too easy, to slip your conception of yourself in the clothes that hang too loose on Binh (that's what he's called, even if it's not his name). His history becomes yours, his desires become yours, and slowly, your impressions of last Tuesday's dinner creep into the story, and your memories of genius become intertwined with the portrayals in the prose, and your desire for a home becomes more important than anything Truong underscores. Your deficiencies, and your strengths, give Binh a body. He is nameless, transient, easily overpowered by reality.
And I'm not certain that this is a bad thing. Unintentionally or intentionally, this sublimation of the individual through the prose echoes the sublimation of the individual through language, which echoes the sublimation of the individual through colonialism. I'm leaning favorably towards this reverberation.

The ease by which all these flashing threads dazzle their way across the narrative, never quite settling down or allowing another to take center stage, makes this a fast read. It's a haphazard stream-of-consciousness, and that's not redundant. It's not stream-of-consciousness in that all thoughts just expel themselves onto the page. Binh's thoughts are still sheltered. But we read them, as if we were reading his face, as he remembers desire. The memories integrate themselves into our own consciousness so subtly that we're never sure if we're recalling his home, or ours. It doesn't matter. Neither of us has one.

I loved reading this. I'm not sure if I loved digesting it, though. It packs a punch, without touching.

Beautiful prose, fascinating setting, no plot.

Yes, the book has strong, thought-provoking elements of what it means to be "other" -- the miserable approach of the narrator, a gay Vietnamese cook in 1920s/30s Paris, or the brave, positive approach of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, the gay American couple who hired him.

Yes, the author can turn a phrase. But there's no story for the pretty words to describe.

It's all flashbacks of relationships real and imagined, mis-directions and lies, and decadent descriptions of food. (The food alone bumped this from 2 stars to 3.) But there's nothing at stake, and no reason to care about what happens to these characters. According to the cover copy, the question is "will Binh travel to America?" But the author never gives me a reason to care if he does or doesn't. There's no reason for him to go, and not much reason for him to stay.

It wasn't a horrible book to read during an extremely long day of cross-country travel, but I wasn't sorry to leave it in the seat-back pocket of the airplane, either.

Tedious. Squeaks into a two-star rating only by virtue of saying so little that it had no opportunity to offend. That, and occasionally the food writing was nice.

It's told from the point of view of a Vietnamese cook who works for Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. The cook is the narrator, and we learn throughout the story his compelling, and devastating, family history and why he left Vietnam.

I was only a few pages into the book when I realized that I don't have the voice yet for my historical novel I'm writing. Truong has captured a rich, unique voice in her book that is addictive and haunting. I only have ideas and notes, not that voice that will drive the story. And I know the only way to find it is to keep researching and writing.

I had high hopes for this book (where else am I supposed to find a book about a gay Vietnamese man leaving the country around the 50s to work as a live-in chef for two lesbian American ladies in Paris?)
And the story is good, with its scandalous turns, but honestly, for a book named The Book of Salt, the writing is so unbearably bland. Take too many meandering thoughts, too much melancholy and the story is stretched out like too wet dough, unable to rise to its full potentials. I procrastinated over finishing the book and had to struggle with the last dozen pages because I couldn't take more of the purple proses.

Also, I was promised delicious, mouth-watering description of French cuisine, which was delivered, kind of, but ruined for me by the salacious dropping of French words without explaining the meaning (a pet peeve of mine, and I live in France so you can't say I'm just petty that I don't understand them.) Writers just don't seem to understand that a proliferation of "monsieur"s and "madame"s among the pages is not enough to convey a French atmosphere. Also, what is this over-romanticization of Paris? There are better cities in the world.

The author's take on the Vietnamese priests and Church are kinda unconvincing for me in general, but the portrayal of the mother is not bad. At least, on this point, the author Gets It. She gets what's it like to be a woman in Vietnam, even if it's not the most stellar portrayal. But also, a few droppings of unexplained Vietnamese words do not do any favor at conveying the ambiance, either. In fact, now that I think about it, the ambiance about this entire book is so mediocre. Which is a shame, because with that kind of melancholic, meandering story telling the author is obviously banking on creating a distinctive ambiance, but it's just fail to me.

I don't even sympathize with the main character. It seems to me he whines too much. I don't think the accomplishment of his craft is portrayed well enough, not enough to offset his drunkenness and his awful taste in men. No wonder he's always sad, he never stands up for himself and when people are shitty to him he's too floppy to even work up a temper, just sit there like "Oh, could I expect any better?" It all makes me want to scream.

If ever a book could be called non-linear, this is it. I always believed Binh told his first person story from the present, or about 1934, and in Paris. Binh is cook for GertrudeStein and Miss Toklas as he calls them. They are not always present, but they are there and, through him, we come to know them while he tells his own story.

This is not unlike those books that take place in one day where you also learn all of the backstory. The location and time changed - his early days in Paris in the mid-20s; as a child or a young adult in Vietnam; a young man aboard a freighter. I have laid them out as if that is the order they appear in the novel. There is almost no order to the novel. Although it didn't take much to figure out the place and usually the time period where his story unfolds. Sometimes the second person creeped in and I was nearly lost. I had to pay close attention!

With only about 60 pages to read today, I awoke thinking about what I might say about this novel. Binh is bitter about his heretofore short life, even cynical to some extent. I wanted to tell him about a conversation I had with my mother over 40 years ago about something I'd read. Happiness isn't always in getting what you like, but in liking what you get. Yeah, I know those things are only occasionally the same thing, but we're talking about happiness, an attitude. Binh, I wanted to say, you need to think about that.

I began to get tired of his attitude and what I'd hoped would be a fantastic read became one I hardly looked forward to finishing. As I started putting some thoughts together, I reminded myself that I don't always have to like the character to like the novel. Well! Take a dose of your own medicine, Elizabeth. It then occurred to me that Truong has written a characterization so real that I was starting to give him advice. Maybe this is better than I'd been thinking. Yes, it is. But I continued to find his attitude tiresome over those last 60 pages. This morning I had hopes that I would convince myself it is more than a 3-star read. I still think it isn't, but I'll wager it sits in the top 1% of that group and on another day might flop over into the 4-star group.