A tour de force. Truong should take literate America by storm.
In a dazzling if sometimes daunting debut, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas’s Vietnamese cook tells his story—and theirs.
By 1934, Binh (it may or may not be his real name) has cooked for Stein and Toklas for five years. As he and his “Mesdames” travel by rail to Le Havre, where the women will depart for America, we learn his history in bits and pieces, often through meandering riffs that may challenge readers’ patience. Binh is the fourth son of an authoritarian Vietnamese Catholic (who may or may not be his biological father). His oldest brother, a sous-chef, finds work for Binh in the kitchen of the French Governor General of Vietnam, but Binh’s homosexual affair with the chef is revealed, and he’s fired. Binh escapes disgrace by going as a cook’s assistant aboard a freighter bound for Europe, then works in a number of French kitchens before finding a home with Stein and Toklas. He describes the famous couple from the intimate perspective of hired help verging on family. While he admires the woman he calls GertrudeStein (sic) as a major energy force, his deeper loyalty goes to Toklas, who shares his passion for the sensuality of preparing food—the novel is in fact largely a meditation on the senses and sensuality, and the salt of the title has different sources (table, sea, tears, sweat) that create different sensations and different resonances. Truong caresses each image and each shifting sensation, forming whole scenes around a taste, color, or touch, language being her other second theme. Binh himself writes in Vietnamese, speaks a little French and less English, but comments on the meaning of words as they play against each other in the three languages. Far less important is the plot involving his affair with a mixed-race American for whom he steals one of Stein’s notebooks.
A tour de force. Truong should take literate America by storm.Pub Date: April 7, 2003
ISBN: 0-618-30400-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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