Q) Why did you choose the title The Book of Salt? A) Salt—in food, sweat, tears, and the sea—is found throughout the novel. The word “salary” comes from the word salt, so salt is another way of saying labor, worth, value. For me, the title is also a nod toward the biblical connotation of salt, in particular to the turning of Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt for “looking back” at her home, the city of Sodom. That story says to me that the Catholic God, whom the cook is so wary of, not only disapproves of the activities of the Sodomites but also of nostalgia. Bình is a practitioner of both. In
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