The Book of Salt

"The Book of Salt is a wonderful book, one of my favourites. It’s by a Vietnamese-American author, Monique Truong, who was born in Saigon but now lives in the US. She has a degree from Yale and a law degree from Columbia. She said that she was inspired to write this novel because of Alice B Toklas’s cookbook , which was Alice’s claim to fame. Truong loves food, so she chooses to write about 1920s Paris through the eyes of Binh, the Vietnamese cook employed by Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Truong says that being a chef is just as much of a vocation as being a writer. In fact, she thinks that taste is a better aesthetic faculty than sight. She thinks that Gertrude Stein writes only by sight, whereas one should be able to taste what one makes. The other thing about the book is that since the cook is Vietnamese, it enables her to talk about Indochina under French rule, so the book has a very different circumference from other books about that time. The name of the political activist and singer Paul Robeson comes up, and Binh meets a young Ho Chi Minh in disguise, so you get a sense of the different political currents in Paris. So this is a great way to update Gertrude Stein from a different point of view, seeing the comings and goings of the people that visited their house at 27 rue de Fleurus. But you also learn about southeast Asia, because the book takes you back to Binh’s early life in Saigon under colonial rule."