The Book of Salt

On my way home from work I pass through East Hennepin Avenue in Minneapolis' Southeast Neighborhood. Lately, the area has been spruced up and now has a number of bars, restaurants and stores catering to a yuppie, white, gay clientelle. One of those stores is a lovely little bookshop called, Query Books. I stopped in a month or so ago and saw the discussion book for June is Monique Truong's The Book of Salt I bought the book and tomorrow evening I will attend the discussion which is being led by Toni McNaron

This book is written from the point of view of "Binh", the Vietnamese cook who worked for Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas for five years in Paris. It is a book in the tradition of several others that take a well-known literary tradition and view it from the point of view of the "other". I am reminded of Jean Rhys' Wild Sargasso Sea, which is the story of the madwomen in the attic from Jane Eyre or Tom Stoppard's play Rosencrantz and Gildenstern are Dead written from the point of view of two minor characters in Shakespeare's play, Hamlet.

By taking the point of view of a minor character in a major story, we see our assumptions and prejudices burst wide open. The book seemed deliberately obscure and I've spent some time, since reading it, looking for information on the internet that might fill in some of the details on events which are merely alluded to by Truong.

By far, the strength of the book is in portraying the incredible barrier that language presents. Incredibly intelligent people are made stupid by the inability to speak a common language. We forget that. There is a wonderful passage about a printer's assistant who cleans up the press, never knowing the words and the meaning of the hot metal stories he touches every day. Here is a wonderful passage about his job:

My third oldest brother worked at a printer press. He cleaned the typeset sheets, ready to be dismantled, voided by the next day's news. He removed each block and cleaned the letters while they were still warm and cloaked in a soft scab of ink, getting his brush into the sickle moons of each “C," the surrending arms of each "Y". ....Anh Tung looked down and saw only the "O" roar of a lion's mouth, the "T" branches of a tree, the "S" curve of the Mekong. Anh Tung smiled to himself thiking how the heat of the presses was not as bad as his friends had warned him, how the taste of ink can be washed away by a cup of tepid tea, how he would just hide his graying fingernails in his pockets when he went courting.

Every day, for forty years, I have spent my life with letters as well. Sometimes I read what I produce, but often I do not. Of if I do, my concentration lasts only as long as it takes to understand whether a sentence has meaning, and then it is gone, erased from my memory to make room for another. I understand the feeling of letters as pictures and not words. The mass of letters as a sculpture, not a story. I like this concept and the way Truong describes it is similar to the way workers in the printing industry experience words even today.