the book of salt summary

It won the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, the Bard Fiction Prize, the Stonewall Book Award-Barbara Gittings Literature Award, and the 7th Annual Asian American Literary Award. An amazingly beautiful book. There's nice writing on every page, and some of the chapters weave an idea through from the beginning, disappearing and reappearing at the end to form a nice complete loop of thought. This information about Salt to the Sea shown above was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. I checked it out recently after being so enamored by the glimpse of the Lost Generation via "The Paris Wife" and "Midnight in Paris." The Book of Salt should appeal to readers with a taste for smart historical fiction or foodies with an eye for good description. It lingers like an ocean voyage. The novel follows the experiences and movements of the Yacoubs, a Palestinian family uprooted by the destruction left in the wake of the 1967 six-day war. I can see how some could read it and not quite remember much about the book. Welcome back. The premise is very interesting; Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas hire a gay Vietnamese cook and the story is his view of his own life and their's in Paris. Born in Saigon, Truong now lives in New York City. There's no insight into them as characters or women, or historical figures. .is the quality that sets fleur de sel apart from the common sea salt” (2003: 98). Is it possible that a book could be useful and a source of pleasure even if it's only read for a fraction of its pages? Book Summary Anikwa and James, twelve years old in 1812, spend their days fishing, trapping, and exploring together in the forests of the Indiana Territory. My friend Naomi lent me this book a couple months ago while she was very homesick for Paris. Salt is the history of the world told from the point of view of the only rock that we eat, which is salt. Binh is cook for GertrudeStein and Miss Toklas as he calls them. The fourth element, heat, determines the kind of texture your food will have. But she's not selling fancy perfumes. She is the recipient of the PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship, Princeton University’s Hodder Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, and U.S.-Japan Creative Artists Fellowship. The Book of Salt is made to be devoured in a single night—a rare and genuine pleasure. Viewing his famous mesdames and their entourage from the kitchen of their rue de Fleurus home, Binh observes their domestic entanglements while seeking his own place in the world. Homeschooling Tips: Administering the Standardized Test, Difference Between Hydraulics and Pneumatics, Emphasizing on Employee Motivation and Strategic Marketing and Planning. BookPage - The Book of Salt Bookpage reviews tend to be short, giving an overview of the author's history, the plot of the book, and the critic's first impressions in a few paragraphs. He narrates his journey while later employed as a live-in cook for Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, two esteemed women who operate a literary salon in Paris. In Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt, salt figures prominently in the life of the cook Binh: not only as the source by which his past and present are revealed, but also as the source that enables him to understand and be understood by others. 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). The writing is beautiful but it feels like it spends the first half of the book searching for something to grab onto. My intrigue in the words and the story lasted only a few cups of tea, a few chapters. by Mariner Books. Read more. There are virtually no scenes whatsoever, just page after page of densely written summary filled with figurative language and aimless musings on life and love and so on and so on. 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). The narrator reminds us that he's tormented by his sense of guilt and shame towards his macho father, but his father never for even a moment transcends the easiest, cheapest single dimension of insecure macho villain, and the narrator never actually seems tormented. I think this is the passage that did it for me: First off, Monique Truong is a super talented author and I will happily look for more of her books. The book's overarching conceit is also really interesting; its narrator is Anh Binh, a Vietnamese expatriate whose gourmet kitchen ways get him hired as cook to Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas. I was wanting to understand more about that circle of artists and the powerful Gertrude Stein from a retrospective vantage. But somehow the underlying fabric remains steady, and you're pulled through the narrative without meaning to be. It won the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, the Bard Fiction Prize, the Stonewall Book Award-Barbara Gittings Literature Award, and the 7th Annual Asian American Literary Award. 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). Born in Saigon, Truong now lives in New York City. Required fields are marked *, Prove You\'re Human * Summary Mark Kurlansky's book Salt, which was published in 2002, is a detailed history of salt and its place in both ancient and modern civilizations. An overabundance of entirely unnecessary similes and metaphors mar this work from the start. This book is driving me crazy. Download "Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat Book Summary, by Samin Nosrat" as PDF. You can tell it's written in a state of transition, whether that's from poetry or from short stories to novels. The only false note here was Binh's ongoing inner argument with his horrible father, which was cheesy, but not in the nice sharp Dublin cheddar kind of way. Want to get the main points of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat in 20 minutes or less? I expected to like this book a lot - it is set in a place and time that interest me (Paris in the 1930s and colonial Viet Nam) and is populated with real-life characters (Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas) who interest me. Before starting 'Salt to the Sea', I had heard quite a lot of praise for the book. She watches in awe as he picks up the tent and runs across the beach with it over his head, when only months ago he struggled to put on his own coat without help. It's amazingly sensual. Isn't that a shame." fans of strong narrative voice & literate foodies, This book made me want to cook a humongous meal and gorge myself, even though I can't cook my way out of paper bag. Summary. The time period is the 1920s and 1930s and focuses on Binh , a young, gay Vietnamese cook living in French-colonized Vietnam who must flee Saigon. Her second novel, Bitter in the Mouth, received the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Rosenthal Family Foundation Award and named a 25 Best Fiction Books by Barnes & Noble and a 10 Best Fiction Books by Hudson Booksellers. I took advantage of today's awful weather to sit inside and read it. As his years of service with Madame and Madame continued, I felt the style becoming less contrived and I was more able to identify with him. eNotes - The Book of Salt Detailed study guides typically feature a comprehensive analysis of the work, including an introduction, plot summary, character analysis, discussion of themes, excerpts of published criticism, and Q&A. The Book of Salt, her first novel, was inspired by a brief mention of an Indochinese cook in The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book. Book Summary Deftly leading readers around the world and across cultures and centuries, Kurlansky takes an inexpensive, mundane item and shows how it has influenced and affected wars, cultures, governments, religions, societies, economies & food. But while the story takes place in the home of Stein and Toklas, the story really isn't about them. —Andrew X. Pham, author of Catfish and Mandala An irresistible, scrupulously engineered confection that weaves together history, art, and human nature…a veritable feast. Book Summary The explosive story of the rise of the processed food industry and its link to the emerging obesity epidemic. A beautiful find. Our book summary of Salt Sugar Fat by Michael Moss explains why we have so many bad food options today, and why we fall for them. She is soon traded for a North Korean prisoner and escorted to … Raynor Winn opens her memoir, The Salt Path, with a short prologue featuring her and her husband, Moth, waking up in their tent on the beach to the shock of the rising tide. Just a moment while we sign you in to your Goodreads account. One seems to glide in and out of scenes (Vietnam, somewhere in the middle of the ocean, Paris) with total ease. but this rang true for me in its description of her life. Helpful. Report abuse. The book is divided into three parts and begins thousands of years in the past. The story is drawn from a brief mention in. Photographers are flashing lights and snapping photos, much to Stein and Toklas’s delight. 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). I would like to say that I liked it more, but I just can't. Read a quick 1-Page Summary, a Full Summary, or watch video summaries curated by our expert team. A feast that satisfies and drew me in to want more. Her brothers are dead, her armies and their war mammoths long defeated and caged behind their borders. I have really enjoyed reading this book and I have yet to even mention the silly pleasure of reading about Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Tolkas. When she first published the book in 1952 as The Price of Salt, author Patricia Highsmith used a pseudonym: Claire Morgan.She'd published one book prior, Strangers on a Train, and her new novel's content was on a totally different track from that thriller. A fictional story of Binh, a Vietnamese man who is a cook to two real people in the 1930’s – Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas. There are books that I know are too sophisticated for me and this is one of them. In fact, I was a little nervous to start it because I was afraid that it wouldn't live up to … Monique Truong's descriptions of food are sensual, but not in the massage kind of way. So while I was more or less caught in its heady spell from an aesthetic point of view, I needed more clarity of incident, dialogue. I can see how some could read it and not quite remember much about the book. Nineteen-year-old Therese Belivet works at a swanky New York City department store during the Christmas season. The Book of Salt. 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. To Anikwa and his family, members of the Miami tribe, this land has been home for centuries. 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