Wednesday, 5 October 2016

Like Water for Chocolate

Like Water For Chocolate was a bitter disappointment.  Reading the blurb, I was geared up for an epic tale of love enduring through impossible circumstances and over decades.  I was hoping for something of Love in the Time of Cholera or Captain Correlli’s Mandolin proportions.  But with traditional Mexican recipes.  Laura Esquivel, unfortunately, is no Gabriel García Márquez.  On the birght side, this does mean that there’s no geriatric sex.  On the not so bright side, it also means that Like Water For Chocolate lacks depth and doesn’t have that same emotional punch when the two lovers finally end up together. 

Esquivel’s book follows the story of Tita, a not so maiden great-aunt of the narrator.  When love of her life, Pedro, proposes marriage to the then sixteen year-old, Tita’s mother refuses (because of tradition) and so Pedro marries Tita’s sister just to be close to her.  There are clear flaws to this plan.  Anyway, time passes, people die and Tita and Pedro love one another in secret.   They are crap at this.  Everyone knows they love one another and Tita’s sister Rosaura even gives them permission to have an affair on the grounds that they are subtle about it. 

The book isn’t particularly well written.  It’s problem when you’re trying to tell such a large and long story in 200 pages.  This is meant to be the history of a family over more than twenty years but it’s not.  It’s the highlights and books like this, ones that are essentially about yearning and unresolvable sexual tension, work because of their length.  Not only does it allow for proper characterisation of everyone (which is woefully absent here- a lack the book suffers for), it gives the depth and reality of the day to day to the thing.  There is an ellipsis of years in the final chapter of the book in which Rosaura dies and Tita breaks off an engagement with another man.  These are all brushed over- as is the characters’ aging.  Part of why books like Love in the Time of Cholera are so good is because they are about the characters growing older and wiser.  Throughout Like Water For Chocolate, and especially in the way it ends, it seems that Esquivel is scared of writing about love in old age. 

Image result for like water for chocolateI didn’t get the recipes either.  Each chapter starts with a list of ingredients and the recipe itself is incorporated into the chapter, sometimes in an oblivious way- such as when Tita makes her Rosaura and Pedro’s wedding cake; sometimes in an obliquely thematic way that involves sausages preserving meat.  I don’t know if it’s the fault of the translation, but they don’t always flow with the narrative.  At times the transition between recipe and story is clunky and this is a shame, because it’s such a novel idea and it’s a great way of characterising Tita who is so linked to the kitchen.


So, to conclude- I did not enjoy this book.  It was too simple.  The blurb seemed so appealing and serious, but Tita doesn’t grow.  Her relationship with Pedro when she is thirty-something is no more credible than her teenager lusting for him.  She doesn’t grow up and the other characters are sketches that are given so little time or personality that there is nothing else to this book.  It is 200 pages of a moody teenager whining about the cards life has dealt her and telling us how to make obscene amounts of delicious sounding chilli.  

I'm now on to The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison.

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