In a compelling novel that takes the reader on a strange journey from Indochina to Paris, the Vietnamese cook to Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas reveals his own fascinating story . . .
Paris, 1934. "Thin Bin", as they call him, has accompanied his employers to the station for their departure to America. His own destination is unclear: will he go with his "Mesdames", stay in France, or return to his native Vietnam? Binh fled his homeland in disgrace, leaving behind his malevolent charlatan of a father and his self-sacrificing mother. For five years, he has been the personal cook at the famous apartment on the rue de Fleurus.
Before Binh's decision is revealed, we are catapulted back to his youth in French-colonized Indochina, where he learned to cook in the Governor-General's kitchen, to his years as a galley hand at sea, and to his days turning out fragrant repasts for the doyennes of the Lost Generation. Binh knows far more than what 'the Steins' eat: he knows their routines and intimacies, their food and follies.
With wry insight, we see Stein and Toklas ensconced in rueful domesticity. But is Binh's account reliable? A lost soul himself, he is a late-night habitue of the Paris demi-monde, an exile and an alien, a man of musings, memories, and possibly lies, susceptible to drink and occasional bloodletting with a kitchen knife . . . Love is the prize that has eluded him, from his family to the men he has sought out in his far-flung journeys, often at his peril - and recently with risk to Stein's manuscript notebooks.
Intricate, enthralling, and witty, the novel weaves in historical characters, from Stein and Toklas to Paul Robeson and Ho Chi Minh, with remarkable originality. Tastes, oceans, sweat, tears - 'The Book Of Salt' is a sharply subtle literary feast, and an inspired novel about food and exile, love and betrayal.
