Queering Lists: Culinary and Literary Modernism in The Book of Salt

Lists, and the practice of listing, provide avenues of insight into Bình, the protagonist in Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt (2003). Working as a cook in the infamous Stein Salon in Old World Paris, Bình, a narrative footnote extracted from The Alice B. Cook Book (1954), exercises a linguistic and culinary grasp shown to rival the resident darling couple’s own modernist projects. Demonstrating the narrator’s artistry under the radar, the list represents a formal feature that stages the particularities of queer aesthetics against the humanist backdrop represented by Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas. As the novel spans geographical coordinates and varied temporalities, Bình’s curious expression of choice prompts narratological overlooking even as it tracks the desires of diasporic bodies and the taste of cherished dishes. Exercised with remarkable restraint, the generative accretions of running catalogs and errant recipes represent small acts of creativity in the novel. Simultaneously, the practice of listing foregrounds the enumerations as tactical sites of interruption and deferral, to constitute a critical methodology that reflects the list-maker’s precarity as a queer Vietnamese exile. This essay attends to the achievements of a minoritarian character who casts a shadow in the familiar archives of high modernism, as the “superficial” stylistic feature of the list opens up The Book of Salt to larger reflections on the intimate ties between coloniality and avant-garde experimentation.