Cooking in Paris for Stein

A few times in this blog I've recommended various books of historical fiction, ones I've read during this sabbatical semester or earlier: The True History of the Kelly Gang, Ahab's Wife, Mariette in Ecstasy. (And don't miss an even better historical novel by Ron Hansen, one of the best novels I've ever read in any genre--his Hitler's Niece.) I recently finished a book quite different from any of those and perhaps from any I've read before: The Book of Salt by Monique Truong. Truong's first novel, it is a dreamy, fluid, at times almost formless construction that delves into the mind and the past of a Vietnamese man who worked for several years as the personal chef to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. I must admit that it took some time delving into the novel before it completely held me, but Truong's eloquence is irresistable and her pictures of pre-war Paris and of pre-communist Vietnam are intriguing, concrete, believable, and engaging. (Keep an eye out for the appearance of someone who almost certainly is a young Ho Chi Minh.) What you shouldn't anticipate on approaching the book is that it will act as some kind of tell all about Stein and Toklas. Indeed, I venture to guess that more pages in the book are devoted to the protagonist's life before he meets Stein and Toklas than after he does. There's a coolness and even an unexpected lack of curiosity in how he describes the two women; and yet at the same time he seems to know or have intuited some rather intimate details about how they regard and have regarded each other. But, ah hah, this brings me to my last point--the stroke of genius that underlies the book and finally makes sense of nearly every one of Truong's moves. We realize, late in the narrative, that what we are reading was not, in the fictional world of the novel, composed by the chef himself but--similar to The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas--written by Stein from the perspective of her Vietnamese employee. She apparently has, from a distant remove, regarded him as quite the curiosity over the years, enough to compose a book with him as the narrator. The title of Stein's manuscript? Why, of course: The Book of Salt. This explains so much about the book that I cannot even begin to tell in this brief post. It also means that the Book of Salt is not merely a good read, but will make for a great second and third and fourth read as you uncover more and more gems served up (if you'll excuse the pun) with brilliant and subtle acumen by this very talented writer.

Article on historical fiction

A short article, blog entry really, by Celeste Ng appeared recently in Fiction Writer's Review. (Click on Ng's name to get to the article.) Ng responds to a lecture given at Breadloaf by Maud Casey. It's worth looking at. Casey's lecture seems to have been a reaction to the idea entertained by many readers that if they read a historical novel they know what it was "really like" to live at a given time or know a given person. Apparently, Casey was told by one French civil servant that he read historical fiction because he didn't want to "waste his time" simply reading something that somebody "made up." Casey's point and Ng's is that we "make up" in historical fiction as much as any other kind of ficiton. This is most obvious when a completely fictitious character narrates or is simply inserted into a historical piece. But it's also true, I think, when one is developing a very real person. Finally, it's the author's idea of the person that must carry the book and that he must remain truthful to, even if that means ignoring or changing historical fact. A historical novel has to work as a novel first and foremost; it's not supposed to, and can't, simply be a matter of passing on information in a more user-friendly way. Not, Ng points out, like blending the spinach of factual info into the brownie of a novel.

All the above is true and needs to be said. With my novel, I know I'm going to have to shout loud and clear, until the message finallhy gets through: "Be forewarned. This is a NOVEL. I am NOT writing a biography." However, I don't think we should discount the usefulness of factual information to the writer of the historical fiction. You don't want to be enslaved by fact, but being wthout fact can actually blunt the imagination. I've found that reading Van Gogh's letters and biographies about him often stimulates my imagination; this activity helps me visualize scenes as well as settings. And not only scenes that actually happened; sometimes scenes that never did. In fact, a number of times in my writing of this book I've wished I could have more information on what a person did or looked like. Or what a neighborhood or apartment looked like. Just a sentence or two of information is sometimes all it takes to engage your fictive, visualizing imagination. (Ng explains that only a one sentence reference in The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook inspired Monique Truong to invent the narrator of her novel The Book of Salt.) With that sentence or two I can draw a whole picture--but I really do need that sentence or two. And I'm sure I'm not unusual in this regard. Finally, such "facts" may be more necessary and useful to the writer than the reader.