Synesthesia, Photography, Intransitive Comparison: Worlding the World as Home in Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt

This essay reads Monique Truong's novel _The Book of Salt_ (2003) within a World Literature framework. It suggests that Truong's novel dramatizes "being in the world" as a complex condition, and that in presenting the vicissitudes of the main character/narrator, Bình, it sheds light on the worldwide conditions that enable and/or hinder both his movements across space and the possibility, for him, to make (narrative) sense of his past and his story. In parallel, this essay maintains that the narrative structure and synesthetic, quasi-intermedial strategies of _The Book of Salt_, substantiated in Bình’s character’s construction and specific narratorial stance, not only make the novel a text of world literature, but can in themselves offer a paradigm for reflecting on world literature as an inescapable horizon for local, specific struggles and claims to take up meaning. Truong illustrates how the world is “worlded” as a continuous process of shrinking and expansion. Just like moments of expansion, of roaming and confronting the world, are orchestrated, for Bình, by the desire and profound need to find a place where he belongs, a home, so a literary text like _The Book of Salt_ yearns for comparison in order to find a position, a “home” as a text of Vietnamese / American literature.