Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel
My rating: 4/5 cats
this was my final selection for the readventurer challenge. i read them alphabetically, based on the suggester’s first name, for arbitrary fairness.
it is strange that i have never read this book, as it is magical realism, doomed love story, and about food, all of which are interests of mine.
here is a quick story that has nothing to do with the book, and i am going to put it in a spoiler for everyone who thinks i am too personal in my book reports, but:View Spoiler » so, the book. this thing is assigned to junior and high school students?? man, no wonder the teen pregnancy rates are where they are. this is a very sensual book. there are peeping toms, intercourse on horseback, the pouring of a frustrated libido into food-preparation, and lovemaking that causes actual sparks, and in one case, death.
this is not a spoiler, because i’m not giving names, and you probably already read this in your progressively anti-canon high school classes.
i am not a fan of romance, unless it is the forbidden, doomed romance of something like wuthering heights. and this one is doomed.
tita is destined to remain unmarried and childless, trapped in the family tradition that the youngest daughter is entrusted with the care of her mother until her death. bum deal, especially since she has fallen into passionate, reciprocal love with pedro, who ends up marrying her sister just to remain close to tita. terrible plan, by the way.
so her life becomes resentment and frustration, and food. tita is the one who is preserving all the family’s traditional recipes, the ones that take all day to make, the ones that are served on special occasions, the ones that require not only ingredients, but are also flavored with the cook’s mood. and these moods are wild and powerful, and affect all who eat the food in different ways.
this book reads almost like a folk- or fairy-tale. the magical realism is of the emotional variety, with ghosts and the physical manifestations of internal passions, rather than the magic standing in for larger social or political themes, which are present, but only as background detail. the focus here is on character.
the book is structured into twelve chapters, each one representing a month, january-december, but the action takes place over a number of years, so the significance of this is unclear to me. however, what is not unclear is that every chapter opens with a recipe, and from the first one, “christmas rolls,” esquivel had my attention. sardines, chorizo, onion, oregano, and serrano chiles, tucked into a roll.
yeah, this is how you open a book.
it s incredibly fast-paced, and the recipes don’t feel like they are taking you away from the action, they are enhancing it with a structure that is completely relevant to the action.
not crazy about the ending, but i definitely liked the rest of it. it awakened my senses, it made me hungry and happy and sad and all the shades in-between. and quite saucy, actually…
She felt so lost and lonely. One last chile in walnut sauce left on the platter after a fancy dinner couldn’t feel any worse than she did. How many times had she eaten one of those treats, standing by herself in the kitchen, rather than let it be thrown away. When nobody eats the last chile on the plate, it’s usually because none of them wants to look like a glutton, so even though they’d really like to devour it, they don’t have the nerve to take it. It was as if they were rejecting that stuffed pepper, which contains every imaginable flavor; sweet as candied citron, juicy as a pomegranate, with the bit of pepper and subtlety of walnuts, that marvelous chile in walnut sauce. Within it lies the secret of love, but it will never be penetrated, and all because it wouldn’t be proper.
i think we all know what is going on here, don’t we?
so – maybe not as enduring as heart of darkness, but much, much spicier.
