The Book of Salt, Monique Truong

Truong's "The Book of Salt" is the first-person story of Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas' live-in cook, a homosexual Vietnamese man with ghosts in his past and his head. Binh, though we never learn what his real name is, grows up poor, the child of a loving mother and tyrannical father. His older brother apprentices him in the kitchen of the Governor-General's house, a place where no one has value unless he is French, or speaks some. These early lessons resonate through his life, as he travels as a ship's cook and struggles to survive in Paris. His reflections on language and love are strange, the effect of the book troubling. Though we can hear Binh's voice, somehow we can never really see him; he is in hiding, lost.
Posted by supersusie at June 12, 2004 12:28 PM