The Book of Salt by Monique Truong

 The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book  is perhaps best known for its Hashish fudge recipe, but it also includes the lines “[He] came to us through an advertisement that I had in desperation put in the newspaper. It began captivatingly for those days: ‘Two American ladies wish to hire…’” The Book of Salt is the fictional account of the man who answered that advertisement. Binh is the live-in cook at 27 rue de Fleurs—the 1930s Parisian home of Alice B. Toklas and the noted intellectual Gertrude Stein.

Binh is Vietnamese, gay, not fluent in French, not upper-class, not rich, not well-educated; he is the colonized in the land of the colonizer–an outsider in a way that Stein and Toklas, for all their unconventionality, can never quite understand. In Paris, Binh’s identity is reduced to his skin; he is “an Indochinese labourer, generalized and indiscriminate, easily spotted and readily identifiable all the same.” The French do not care if he is from Vietnam or Cambodia or Laos, for all these countries belong to France, to “the same Monsieur and Madame”. Binh longs to be back in Saigon, where he was, “above all, just a man”, where he would not be perpetually Othered.

 The relationship between colonizer and colonized is perhaps ultimately a story of betrayal. The mother country’s claims of its moral and intellectual superiority justify its right to rule—a justification which proves hollow in the face of its treatment of the colonized. Binh, to me, is emblematic of the relationship between France and Vietnam; the betrayal at the national level is mirrored in the life story of this one Vietnamese man. In Saigon, Binh is abandoned by his French lover, following which he leaves for France to find employment as a cook. France, however, never lets him forget that he is a servant. His employers often fire him when they tire of his “exoticism”; Binh of course has little recourse to justice in such situations. And Stein and Toklas, for all their enlightened ways, are often cruel to him, showing more concern for their beloved dogs’ well-being than Binh’s, calling him their “Little Indo-Chinese”, and much more.

 Yet Binh is not without agency. The intimate act of cooking and serving food gives him a vantage point in the domestic space of the Stein-Toklas household–an access to the couple that their admirers envy. Food is one of the most overused metaphors in immigrant literature, with the pungent ethnic dish inevitably contrasted against decorous white bread sandwiches, but Binh’s position as cook is essential to the novel rather than a convenient peg for hanging up colourful ethnic differences. But that agency too carries seeds of betrayal within itself; there is no refuge for Binh, at least not in France.

 Truong selectively reveals information to construct her complex, whorled tale,   delivering surprise after surprise to the reader in the process. At no point, however, did I feel deliberately manipulated, even though she yanks the rug from under my feet every few pages. The intensity of the protagonist’s voice allows Truong to pull off this authorial chicanery; Binh is so raw and real that we immerse ourselves unquestioningly into his (self-admittedly) unreliable narrative. To apply that overused but admittedly convenient food metaphor, The Book of Salt is a millefeuille of a novel, so intricately layered that it is nothing less than a feat of engineering.

 Truong has stated in an interview that while reading Toklas’s book, she felt “…in the Paris of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, these “Indo-Chinese” cooks were just a minor footnote. There could be a personal epic embedded inside that footnote, I thought. The Book of Salt is that story…”  It has always seemed to me that the Binhs of our world constitute an essential but ignored part of empire-building; they lurk in margins and in footnotes, waiting to undermine the master narrative, waiting for someone to give them a hearing. Truong’s passionate, beautiful novel makes Binh’s story worth the long wait.

 ***

I read this book for the OneShot Southeast Asia challenge, which urges readers to step out of their reading comfort zones.  Well, my comfort zone is South Asian fiction, which is of course miles away from Southeast Asian writing.  Thanks to Lisa for the book recommendation, and to Colleen for setting up this challenge.

Then Again by Elyse Friedman

Seldom, I believe, has a writer been as poorly served by her book covers as Elyse Friedman. Waking Beauty, a darkly thoughtful exploration of the unfair advantage beauty bestows upon the (unworthy) recipient, had a pink-and-white and-blonde-and-sparkly cover, thus dooming chick-lit fans to chagrin even as readers of literary fiction averted their eyes. 

Then Again, with a smart, punchy title that can be interpreted in at least two different ways in the context of the  plot, written with a precision that would make a watchmaker glow, features a split image of a pallid, glowering girl on its cover. Everything about it–the girl’s faintly repellent gaze, the gimmicky shot , the shiny stiff paper of the cover– begs that the book be tossed aside. Which I would have undoubtedly done had I not LOVED Waking Beauty.

Tom Robbins once famously said, “It’s never to late to have a happy childhood”.  What if someone took that to heart–a someone with the wealth and connections of a successful Hollywood screenwriter–and decided to relive his childhood for an entire weekend, literally? The reluctant participants in the scheme include the screenwriter’s sisters Michelle (the novel’s narrator), and Marla.  The trio’s parents are dead (natch), but Joel the screenwriter has arranged for a faux mom and faux dad. The Toronto house the siblings grew up in twenty years ago is recreated down to the avocado green carpet and the struggling tree out front.

What a setup. And Friedman has the prose skills and the sheer balls to carry it off.  The narrator’s voice alternates between syrupy sentimentality and hard-edged observation, and this pairing works beautifully with the theme of revisited adolesence. The novel’s pacing is impeccable, skittering between past and present till the two fuse in an explosive climax. The delight of such a book lies as much in the big idea as in the tiny details; I was reminded on more than one occasion of the film Goodbye Lenin .

I leave you with this image from the novel. “…Canadian movies, publicly funded and carefully crafted–like chilled white pie crusts, pinched and perfect…”  I’m going to tear off the miserable front cover of Then Again  and replace it with a gilded portrait of Friedman.  

This review-ish piece is my contribution to John’s Read a Canadian Book Month challenge.

Read Your Way Around the World Challenge: Iceland

Today (April 23rd)  is World Book and Copyright Day. It’s organized by  UNESCO to promote reading, publishing and copyright. I feel obliged to honor the occasion–especially now that I’m in the middle of a copyright flap  

Global Voices is conducting a book challenge titled “Read your way around the world”  to mark the day.   

  

The Challenge is as follows:

1) Read a book during the next month from a country whose literature you have never read anything of before.
2) Write a blog post about it during the week of April 23.
3) Tag your posts with #gvbook09

I joined the challenge on Lotus Reads, and chose Paradise Reclaimed by the Icelandic writer Halldor Laxness.  Laxness  won the Nobel prize for literature in 1955, and his book has been on my shelf for a long long time. It seemed the perfect choice.

Alas, my response to the challenge was less than successful. This book was just not my thing. 

Paradise Reclaimed deals with the adventures of a farmer named Steinar of Steinahlioar (I don’t know how to insert the special characters that every proper noun in this novel seems to require). Steinar is a simple man who happens to own a  beautiful horse. When the king of Denmark visits Iceland, Steinar decides to present him the horse, and thus sets out on the first of his travels. On the way, he meets an Icelandic Mormon who tells him all about the Promised Land.  After a couple of adventures, Steinar abandons his wife and son and daughter and sets off for Utah.

Steinar’s farm falls into disarray. The daughter is raped and becomes pregnant; in her innocence, she insists it’s a virgin birth.  The wife and son are relentlessly exploited. Their land is destroyed.

I quit reading here, midway through the novel. It was just too depressing and infuriating.

I’ve no doubt that this novel is a saga of the redemptive power of goodness, but mostly, I just wanted to kick Steinar in the seat of his pants. The introduction by Jane Smiley states that the novel “asks us to accept in Steinar a man of radical innocence, who neither ruminates upon nor questions his own decisions, but acts and then accepts the results of his actions.” Well, the novel failed to make me accept Steinar or suspend judgement; I blamed him soundly for going off half-cocked to Utah. Laxness evidently intends Steinar to be something of a tragic hero. Not that I’d dream of contradicting a Nobel prize-winning writer, but Steinar seems to me a bit of an ass; I can understand his desire to see the Promised Land, but why couldn’t he take his willing family along instead of leaving them to the wolves? As for his wife and children, they never blame Steinar for abandoning them; rather, the daughter weeps for her father and says “If Daddy is a  Mormon, then I want to be a Mormon woman.”

I also think much of my inability to relate to this book stems from my ignorance of Icelandic folklore–I can tell I’m  missing all sort of references to myths and historical events that would have made this book a much richer read.  This omission is of course entirely my fault (I should  have hunted out the Cliffs Notes), but if I had read something about Iceland, I couldn’t have chosen this book for the challenge.  Anyway, the overall feeling was rather like reading Beckham’s autobiography without ever having seen the man kick a ball.  Not satisfactory.

I have to say: Laxness has perfect control of his material. I’m admiring the way the author plays off Steinar’s innocence against his child-like wisdom even as I resent the plot turns. He successfully  uses a strange satirical humor while writing about brutal events, and there’s a fable-like tone to the prose that perfectly suits this kind of story. In sum, I think I’ve picked the wrong book by the right author. I can’t bring myself to finish Paradise Reclaimed, but I’ll be hunting out other works by Laxness. Oh, and I’ll have start figuring out those special characters soon.