The book “Salt” by Mark Kurlansky is about making, selling, and using salt throughout history. This book talks about routes used by animals to how the vikings used it to cook to the empires and economies built off of salt. One of the main themes expressed in this book was “the importance of something is only what people think of it” if someone needs something, or think they need something, they will value it more and want it more. On the last page of the last chapter, the author asks, “why should salt that is washed be cheaper than salt with dirt?” To me, “Salt” shows that It doesn’t matter what the quality of something is to say that it is valuable, but how much somebody thinks they need it.
Mark Kurlansky’s “Salt” was an incredible read with a lot of interesting information. However, it also felt incredibly unsettling whenever there were moments of character and dialogue, especially in the middle of a chapter. An example of this is at the end of chapter 26 when Jadeau was introduced as a source for his Galette Fine cookie recipe. People appearing as sources for the recipes were not uncommon, but when Jadeau started talking, it kind of broke my immersion. Most of the book is written in the past tense — as it should because all of the events happened in the past — but when somebody starts talking, the tone shifts to present tense and it makes things uncomfortable.
My thoughts on Litarary Non-Fiction:
I personally believe that this genre as a whole is overall incredibly uncomfortable to read because it shows real-life events in a more dramatized fashion. Literary non-fiction is a combination of the informative nature of non-fiction with the storytelling aspects of fiction — one of them being the aspect of suffering for enjoyment. Authors of fiction usually write their characters suffering to progress the story and the readers will read and subsequently enjoy the book partly because of the suffering and reward. If everything is fake, then it is fine because fiction isn’t real and nobody real went through that pain. In literary non-fiction, because there were actual living people who went through that pain and this can become problematic for the reader to enjoy a nice story off of those who suffered. “Salt” didn’t really have much of that, seeing as most of its cast centered around people who only existed to say a couple lines and the author. I have many more thoughts on this topic as a whole which I will not include as this paragraph is getting much bigger than the actual analysis.