#Monique Truong

[strathshepard]

An-My Lê: Untitled, Nam Ha, 1994, from “Viêt Nam” 

“Whenever I had very difficult decisions to make, I would just suffer and torture myself trying to think through all the possible outcomes. And obviously, you never get to the end of it because you just can’t know. So I would tell my younger self, ‘It’s okay to use your brain and try to think through things, but then just dive in and things will work out.’” –An-My Lê to Monique Truong and Ocean Vuong at The Brooklyn Rail

[bookola-de]

Rezension: Simone Kabst liest einen Gemeinschaftsroman - Vierzehn Tage

Simone Kabst liest einen Gemeinschaftsroman der Herausgeber Margaret Atwood und Douglas Preston Mord kennt kein Alter von 36 Autoren Rezension © 2024 by Ute Spangenmacher für BookOla.de 2024 Hörbuch Hamburg Sprecherin: Simone Kabst ungekürzte Lesung Laufzeit: 929 Minuten Multimedia CD ISBN: 978-3-8449-2944-7 Erscheinungstermin: 15.02.2024 bestellen bei Amazon   Continue reading Rezension:…

[morgan--reads]

The Book of Salt - Monique Truong

Summary: Having fled Vietnam after a scandal, Binh heads to Paris where he answers the ad of two American ladies—Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas—for a live-in cook. 

Quote: “The irony of acquiring a foreign tongue is that I have amassed just enough cheap, serviceable words to fuel my desires and never, never enough lavish, impudent ones to feed them.”

My rating: 3.0/5.0   Goodreads: 3.52/5.0 

Review: The book has two strengths that kept me turning the pages: the absolutely gorgeous writing and the relationship between Toklas and Stein. The relationship is rendered in such intimate and charming specificity that they immediately felt like real people, instead of flat historical figures constructed of biographical facts. The whole story feels lived in in that way, but Binh’s sad, meandering tale is not nearly as compelling as the setting it takes place in. There are too many unclear shifts back and forth in time and Binh has no real arc or growth.

Read-alike: Giovanni's Room - James Baldwin

[ugisfeelings]

An interview with Monique Truong

How did you get the idea for your book? When I was in college, I bought a copy of the Alice B. Toklas Cook Book because I was curious about Toklas' hash brownie recipe. It turned out that the famous recipe was not a Toklas recipe at all, but one submitted by the artist Brion Gysin in a chapter called "Recipes from Friends." Gysin's recipe was actually for a "haschich fudge" and was for a sort of dried fruit bar concoction "dusted" with a bunch of pulverized "canibus sativa." It didn't sound tasty to me, but I read the rest of the book anyway and found that it was less of a cookbook and more of a memoir. In a chapter called "Servants in France," Toklas wrote about two "Indochinese" men who cooked for Toklas and Stein at 27 rue de Fleurus and at their summer house in Bilignin. One of these cooks responded to an ad placed by Toklas in the newspaper that began "Two Americans ladies wish- " By this point in the cook book, I had already fallen for these two women and for their ability to create an idiosyncratic, idyllic life for one another. When I got to the pages about these cooks, I was to say the least surprised and touched to see a Vietnamese presence and such an intimate one at that in the lives of these two women. These cooks must have seen everything, I thought. But in the official history of the Lost Generation, the Paris of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, these "Indo-Chinese" cooks were just a minor footnote. There could be a personal epic embedded inside that footnote, I thought. The Book of Salt is that story, as told from the perspective of Bình, a twenty-six-year old Vietnamese man living in Paris in the late 1920's. I have imagined him as one of the candidates who answered Stein and Toklas' classified ad.

Is there really a manuscript by Stein entitled The Book of Salt? No, I made that manuscript up. In the novel, Bình claims that Stein's The Book of Salt is about him. Stein has certainly written about cooks and servants. In Portraits and Prayers, for instance, there is a piece called "B. B. or the Birthplace of Bonnes" about all the women from Brittany who had worked in the Stein and Toklas' household. Also, two of the "lives" in Stein's Three Lives were servants. So, it does not seem improbable to me that Stein could have devoted a few words to a cook like Bình. What inspired you to include a fictionalized Ho Chi Minh in the novel? Actually, I think of the character in The Book of Salt as a fictionalized Nguyen Ai Quoc as opposed to a fictionalized Ho Chi Minh. From what I have read about him, his name changes often signaled or accompanied a significant change in the man as well. When he was in Paris, he was literally "a man on the bridge" between democracy and socialism. He eventually felt rejected by both and turned towards communism to reach his goal of independence and self-determination for Vietnam. By that time, he was well on his way to becoming Ho Chi Minh. The man that interested me was Nguyen Ai Quoc, the young man living in Paris who read Shakespeare and Dickens in the original English, who wrote plays and newspaper articles, who earned money as a painter of fake Chinese souvenirs, a photographer's assistant. In the novel, "the man on the bridge" tells Bình that he also worked as a cook. Is this based on fact? Yes, I had done some research on Nguyen Ai Quoc because someone told me that he had been a cook in France. It turned out that he was an assistant cook at the pie bakery of the Carlton Hotel in London, whose kitchen at that time was under the supervision of the legendary French chef Auguste Escoffier. As a young man, he had left Vietnam by working as a "mess boy" on a French ocean liner going from Saigon to Marseilles. I decided that my cook, Bình, would take a similar route. Many of Bình's experiences on the fictional freighter Niobe were based on or inspired by the more well-documented experiences of Ba, as he called himself then, on the Latouche Treville. Nguyen Ai Quoc's travels out of Vietnam began in 1911, and they took him to Dakar, Brooklyn, London, Paris and many other port cities around the world. From 1917 to 1923 he lived in Paris. Some time in the summer of 1923, he left Paris for Moscow to begin his full-time education and activity as a "revolutionary."

(x).

[nedlittle]

apropos of nothing, here are some gay historical fiction novels that engage with historical queerness in thoughtful, complex, and interesting ways (organized chronologically)

hild by nicola griffith ↪ early 7th century england

a tip for the hangman by alison epstein ↪ 1585-1593 england

confessions of the fox by jordy rosenberg ↪ 1702-1724* england

the confessions of frannie langton by sara collins ↪ 1812-1826 jamaica to england

patience and sarah by isabel miller ↪ 1816 america

devotion by hannah kent ↪ 1830s prussia to australia

the sweetness of water by nathan harris ↪ 1865 america

whiskey when we're dry by john larison ↪ 1885 america

the city of palaces by michael nava ↪ 1897-1913 mexico

tipping the velvet by sarah waters ↪ 1890s england

at swim, two boys by jamie o'neill ↪ 1915-1916 ireland

the gods of tango by caro de robertis ↪ 1913-1920s argentina

uncommon charm by emily bergslien and kat weaver ↪ 1920s america

the book of salt by monique truong ↪ 1930s vietnam to paris

the amazing adventures of kavalier and clay by michael chabon ↪ 1939-1954 america and beyond

the flight portfolio by julie orringer ↪ 1940 france

the savage kind by john copenhaver ↪ 1940s america

a thin bright line by lucy jane bledsoe ↪ 1950s america

*this one has a framing device and footnotes from the present day but the bulk of the story is set in the early 1700s

[haysianrose]

An Ode to the Áo Dài

The traditional Vietnamese garment, which translates to “long shirt,” has been reimagined as a modern heirloom, writes author Thao Thai.

[...]

When Kelly Marie Tran wore an áo dài designed by Thái Nguyễn to the Oscars in 2022, this moment created a magnificent stir, both among Americans and Vietnamese people of the diaspora who’d never seen our national garment represented on a red carpet. It was, in so many ways, a kind of permission to exist outside of the margins, to have our culture spotlit without explanation or apology.

Nguyễn remembers receiving a phone call from Tran, who asked if it was possible to create an áo dài in three days. He said, “[That call] woke me up.” After 16 hours of work, the team at Thái Nguyễn Atelier finished the áo dài hours before the award show. Nguyễn describes the way that American PR companies and buyers once told him that his name and identity were too ethnic; they didn’t think an áo dài would ever be a mainstream garment. “I’ve been yearning for that moment,” Nguyễn says, recalling the first time he saw Tran at the Oscars. “Afterward, a Vietnamese follower sent me a photo of her five-year-old daughter in an áo dài and said, ‘She can wear this now to a birthday party, instead of a Cinderella or Snow White gown.’” In fact, Nguyễn is co-writing Mai’s Ao Dai, a children’s book about a girl who discovers the beauty of áo dài, with Vietnamese American writer Monique Truong. Such representation is already changing the way younger generations are embracing the áo dài.

Full article.

[suguwu]

Do you have any fav books?? :)

i do!! admittedly i don't read much anymore but i'm trying to get back into it! so if anyone has any recs i am all ears.

some of my favorites, though: frankenstein, the mermaid's daughter, the bone people, the lace reader, good omens, sharp objects, basically anything discworld by terry pratchett, the book of salt (monique truong), the book of salt (patricia highsmith), and the omnivore's dilemma all come to mind!

[poesiya]

reading list for december - january

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

The Birth of Tragedy by Nietzsche

White Love and Other Events in Philippine History by Vicente Rafael

The Sweetest Fruits by Monique Truong

[magiccarpetman]

Autumn Reading List

Now Reading:

Honor, Vengeance, and Social Trouble by Peter Arnade and Walter Prevenier

The Book of Salt by Monique Truong (Page 134/261)

The Seven Wonders of Sassafras Springs by Betty G. Birney (Page 36/210)

Next Up:

The Wedding People by Allison Espach

Finished books under cut.

Words words words

[gigantic-spider]

The Dispossessed design commentary, cont.

Today I wanted to talk about one of the Playbook Moves for The Dispossessed.

The whole Playbook emerges from the central metaphor that this whole playbook came from: being an immigrant in a foreign country. Now this comes with a biiiiiiig caveat: I myself am not an immigrant. I am also not trying to portray a specific immigrant experience here, but rather using the lens of a literal alien from another planet to explore what that kind of person might feel like. The ideas in this playbook are also rooted in a number of Asian-American books I read as part of an English course dealing with migration, melancholia, and memory. Some of the books I most highly recommend from that course (not necessarily as inspirations for this, just things that I really enjoyed):

No-No Boy by John Okada

The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

The Book of Salt by Monique Truong

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

All this said, let's return to this Move. The name (as all the names of Moves in this Playbook) comes from an H.G. Wells novel (of The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds fame). Originally, "Bulpington of Blup" was titled "Stranger in a Strange Land" after the Robert Heinlein novel, but it just stuck out too much (for me) from the rest of them. So instead, I combed through Wells' list of novels and found this strange one where an otherwise ordinary man comes to be dominated by some complex of behavior that destabilizes his relationship to the world.

This Move is interesting to me, because it plays on the disconnect between the dominant mode of society (Earth, but specifically Victorian London) and the foreign mode of behavior (the way of life that your alien was brought up in). The Playbook starts with a -1 in Presence (the social skill), meaning that you have a base ~58% chance to fully fail any action based on social skills. By leaning into the strangeness of your alien customs, you can always succeed with a cost, disconcerting upper class Londoners but exposing yourself to their withering regard. Are you willing to gamble that someone will take you seriously when you play their game? Or will you disavow their rules and reap the rewards/suffer the consequences?

This Move also pairs with one of the Masks of the Future (a way to improve roll results and change your character during play):

Almost all the Masks of the Future in this Playbook involve losing one of your Moves (and you start with all of them) in return for a bump to a stat. This Mask shows your alien losing their strange behaviors/their behaviors being co-opted as amusing to the elite. You have become less strange and offputting to Londoners, but at the cost of being forced into a form more comprehensible and comfortable to them.

My main goal with the design choices in this Playbook is to show the player a variety of paths forward, all with clear(ish) signposting. Don't like feeling on the outside of society? Feel free to use that Mask first chance you get! Enjoy being rewarded for inventing strange customs from your home planet? Never touch that Mask! The design definitely follows a fairly particular (and pretty standard) version of an immigrant experience, but I like it because I see similarities between it and my experience as a queer person. There are choices to be made, compromises that have to be navigated, and options about your uniqueness and character that have to be weighed without any clear correct answers available.

[charliejaneanders]

I feel like I'm in pretty good company here

(This is the cover and description of Fourteen Days, edited by Margaret Atwood, featuring my name alongside Margaret Atwood, Jennine Capó Crucet, Joseph Cassara, Angie Cruz, Pat Cummings, Sylvia Day, Emma Donoghue, Dave Eggers, Diana Gabaldon, Tess Gerritsen, John Grisham, Maria Hinojosa, Mira Jacob, Erica Jong, CJ Lyons, Celeste Ng, Tommy Orange, Mary Pope Osborne, Douglas Preston, Alice Randall, Ishmael Reed, Roxana Robinson, Nelly Rosario, James Shapiro, Hampton Sides, R.L. Stine, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Monique Truong, Scott Turow, Luis Alberto Urrea, Rachel Vail, Weike Wang, Caroline Randall Williams, De’Shawn Charles Winslow, and Meg Wolitzer)

[ugisfeelings]

What Keeps You Here?

[...]

“Bee, what about a photograph?” “Yes,” I nod, acknowledging my childlike wish for an image of you and me. “We’ll do it. We’ll go to Lené Studio and have our photograph taken, once you . . .” An even exchange. A fair trade. A give for a take. I have played this game before, I think. (212, ellipsis original)

“Once incorporated into this exchange economy, Binh finds he is capable of theft and infidelity, the promise of enduring connection—of love, perhaps— overwriting his need for security. A willful naivete (“childlike wish”) comes into play, as Binh declaims “an even exchange” and a “fair trade,” actively ignoring the differential material circumstances and impact of the act. Truong registers, too, the disruptive effects of commodity fetishism (Lattimore’s obsession with the manuscript) to the possibilities of solidarity and community among racialized and colonized subjects.

The photograph for which Binh commits theft in the end remains uncollected. The image records Binh and Sweet Sunday Man, but is only half paid for, Lattimore having absconded with the manuscript despite his promise to the contrary, and Binh finds himself distracted by and drawn to another image, one of a stranger once encountered on a bridge, a fellow countryman (257). The man in the photograph, identified as Nguyen Ai Quoc, one of Ho Chi Minh’s pseudonyms, draws Binh to him.

I would rather save my money, the sweat of my labor, for the man on the bridge . . . I thought. . . . Clever, I again thought. “Nguyen Ai Quoc” was obviously not the name with which the man on the bridge was brought into this world . . . The giveaway . . . was the combination “Ai Quoc.” By itself, the words mean “love” and “country” in that order, but when con- joined they mean “patriot.” Certainly a fine name for a traveler to adopt, I thought, a traveler whose heart has wisely never left home. (247)

The photograph of Binh and Lattimore, uncollected, remains an image rather than a document; its evidentiary weight remains unclaimed, and the desire for such formal documentation— proof of existence in the form of visual record — dissipates. The other, of Nguyen Ai Quoc, bespeaks the world made through colonialism and struggle for independence, a world of networks and unexpected arrivals and encounters, overlaid by economic ex- change but never reducible to it. Indeed, Binh stays in Paris because, after sharing a day, a meal with the man on the bridge, Binh believes that “it was a city where something akin to love had happened, and it was a city where it could happen again” (258).

Nguyen Ai Quoc, who would become the prime minister and president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and whose government will lead to independence from France in 1954, anticipates liberation and figures a renewed possibility of home. Binh cannot in the time setting of the novel know the role that Ho Chi Minh will play in the years to come, but the reader cannot but flash into the magnitude of history that the man on the bridge prefigures. It is by staging this encounter between Binh and Nguyen, and by leaving us at the novel’s close with the potentiality, both affective and world changing, that the merging of underclass, queer desires together with liberation from empire implies, that Truong leaves us, finally, with hope, but a kind of hope that is not uplifting so much as tethered to an unchosen state of aloneness: “‘What keeps you here?’ I hear a voice asking. Your question, just your desire to know my answer, keeps me, is my response. In the dark, I see you smile. I look up instinctually, as if someone has called out my name” (261). Desire sustains; desiring, that self-dissolving sense of consubstantiality, affords the occupation of the position of both the desiring subject and the object of desire.”

Chuh, Kandice. “Mis/Taken Universals.” In The Difference Aesthetics Makes: On the Humanities “After Man", 98–121. Duke University Press, 2019.