North Carolina Literary Review

Page 23

North Carolina Literature in a Global Context

N C L R ONLINE

23

An Appetite for Language:

Introducing Monique Truong by Lisa Hinrichsen

Let me start with a simple fact: it’s impossible to read Monique Truong’s work without becoming hungry. My copy of The Book of Salt is well-thumbed with imprints of bits of snacks I couldn’t help consuming, and marked with folded-down pages that tell the story of retreats to stir and pour and bake and eat some inspired concoction before returning to the evocative, erotic kitchens at the center of her sensual story. Her most recent novel, Bitter in the Mouth, takes us to a world far away from the cosmopolitan haute cuisine explored in The Book of Salt, dropping us into the small town of Boiling Springs, North Carolina. Even so, reading it still demanded buttery biscuits washed down with a glass of sweet tea.1 Appetite is a complex, highly conditioned drive, and Truong’s prose beautifully explores how food can serve as an agent and expression for discipline, fear,

1

Monique Truong, The Book of Salt (New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 2003); Bitter in the Mouth (New York: Random House, 2010); quotations from these novels will be cited parenthetically. ABOVE RIGHT Monique Truong

PHOTOGRAPH BY MICHELE PANDURI METALLI

This essay is adapted from Lisa Hinrichsen’s introduction to the author at the 2014 Society for the Study of Southern Literature (SSSL) Conference. Spoiler alert: If you have not yet read Truong’s Boiling Springs, North Carolina–set novel Bitter in the Mouth, you might want to do so before you read this introduction to the author. Then enjoy the interview with Truong, conducted by Kirstin Squint at the SSSL conference, and an essay on the novel by Rachael Price, which originated as a paper presented at this same conference, both to appear in the print issue of NCLR 2015.

hunger, and loss. In tracing both the joyful and the melancholic sides of eating, Truong’s novels reveal how taste informs the various ways in which we ingest the world and inhabit social categories, such as nation, gender, race, and region. In her work, Truong draws on the concrete specifics of the worlds that she knows. She was born in Saigon, South Vietnam, and came to the United States in 1975, fleeing the Vietnam War with her family to settle in Boiling Springs, North Carolina, then Centerville, Ohio. But she transforms these worlds with a sly wit, a careful eye, and a historian’s sense of detail laced with literary imagination, creating tales that envelop us in acts of consumption, simultaneously quotidian and extraordinary, pleasurable but never innocent.

LISA HINRICHSEN earned her PhD from Boston University and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Arkansas. She is the author of Possessing the Past: Trauma, Imagination, and Memory in Post-Plantation Southern Literature (Louisiana State University Press, 2015), and she has contributed essays to the Southern Literary Journal, Journal of Modern Literature, and African American Review, among other publications.


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