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THE BOOK OF SALTMonique Truong. Houghton Mifflin, $24 (256p) ISBN 0-618-30400-2A mesmerizing narrative voice, an insider's view of a fabled literary household and the slow revelation of heartbreaking secrets contribute to the visceral impact of this first novel. From a few lines in The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, Truong reimagines the Vietnamese cook who was hired by the famous residents at 27 rue de Fleurus. Bình, as he calls himself, is an exile from his homeland, where he was denounced because of a homosexual relationship and banished by his brutal father. After three years at sea, Bình ends up in Paris, where he answers Toklas's ad ("Two American ladies wish...") and enters the household of Gertrude Stein. The story begins in 1934 when the women he calls "my Mesdames" are about to tour America, and Bình fears he'll be cast adrift once again. Flashbacks reveal his loneliness and guilt, his doomed love affairs (he enjoys a brief tryst with Ho Chi Minh, whom he knows only as "the man on the bridge") and his sadness at having abandoned his mother and his native land. The tone throughout is poignant, lightened by Bình's subversive wit; for all his bitterness and resentment, he is a captivating narrator, as adept at describing Stein's literary salon as the contents of Toklas's kitchen. If Truong sometimes stretches the range of Bình's understanding and powers of observation, interpreting even the thoughts of Stein herself, the narrative rings with emotional authenticity. Truong's supple prose is permeated with sensual detail, reminiscent of A Debt to Pleasure
in its evocation of the erotic possibilities of food. But it is her intuitive understanding of the condition of exile—"the pure, sea salt sadness of the outcast"—that infuses her novel with richness and beauty. Author tour; rights sold in U.K. and France.(Apr. 7)
