Reading Monique Truong’s Book of Salt
The entire novel entices the reader to have patience and wait for Binh’s truth to be revealed; he says himself that “words, I will grant you, are convenient, a handy shortcut to meaning. But too often, words limit and deny. For those of us who are better trained, we need only one and we can piece together the rest” (117). For the reader, salt is the word that unlocks the rest.
Salt, first and foremost, is posed to the reader as the answer to a mystery; when Binh receives a letter after five years of silence from his brother Minh, he wants to lick the envelope, “certain to find the familiar sting of salt, but what [he] needed to know was what kind: kitchen, sweat, tears, or the sea” (5).
This introduces the various types of salt that will appear continuously throughout the novel while also eluding to the multiplicity and pervasiveness of salt – indeed, the pervasiveness of Binh, who exists within all the aforementioned categories: as a cook, a man accustomed to a warmer climate, a forlorn outsider, and a traveler by sea. We are drawn in to taste Binh’s loneliness – “the pure, sea-salt sadness of the outcast” (19) – but we are pushed away because “the true taste of salt – the whole of the sea on the tip of the tongue, sorrow’s sting, labor’s smack – has been lost” (212).
Initially, like the details of Binh’s life before he arrived in France, it is difficult to grasp salt’s many roles within the novel; at times, salt seems to be a positive, steady, and comforting presence in Binh’s tumultuous life, such as when he tells himself, over and over again in order to keep warm in the cold, “before I could take in my mother’s milk, I tasted the salt on her nipple” (217).
Contrastingly to the warmth of that association, however, Binh later refers to snow as salt and begs forgiveness for his “nonaffection for snow” (225). Still, at other times, salt plays a definite role in sexuality; as a young man, Binh thought of desire as a cross between “the last peaches of the season honeyed by the sun, the taste of my own salt on my fingers” (58).
Binh’s ability to judge character seems balanced on the presence of salt. Upon meeting Marcus Lattimore, who will become his Sweet Sunday Man, Binh is “acutely aware when [he is] being watched, a sensitivity born from absence, a grain of salt on the tongue of a man who has only tasted bitter” (37). Salt also plays a role in other characters’ understanding of Binh; Miss Toklas, too, seems to know that Binh has an almost compulsive desire to add salt to all his dishes and informs him that “salt is an ingredient to be considered and carefully weighed like all the others” (212).
GertrudeStein, apparently, understands so intrinsically that Binh is made up of salt that she writes a novel about him, entitling it The Book of Salt. When Binh discovers the title of the book, he wonders about salt, “GertrudeStein, what kind? Kitchen, sweat, tears, or the sea?. . .their stings, their smarts, their strengths, the distinctions among them are fine. Do you know which ones I have tasted on my tongue?” (261).
Presented with the absolute complexity of these associations with salt, among all the paradoxes and contradictions and seeming leaps of logic, it is clear that salt is humanized to a certain extent, that salt reflects Binh’s own humanity, that salt and Binh are nearly one. When salt is described as “the hinge that allows the flavor of other ingredients to swing wide open” (212), the reader is left to wonder if Binh, as the salt flower, allows other people’s flavors to come out – or if salt, acting upon Binh, reveals all his various flavors.
