Review: Like Water for Chocolate

Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Like Water for Chocolate (full title: Like Water for Chocolate: A novel in monthly installments with recipes, romances, and home remedies), published in 1989, was adapted for film by Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Arau, in 1992, the year I first read the novel. It tells the story of Tita de la Garza, youngest daughter and talented cook, along with a series of twelve recipes of meals that Tita prepares on a variety of occasions. The novel employs magical realism in the style of Isabel Allende and Gabriel García Márquez.

As the novel opens, Tita has caught the eye of a young man, Pedro, who falls in love with her at first sight. He asks for her hand in marriage but Tita's mother, the cold and callous Mamá Elena, informs him that it's the family tradition that the youngest daughter never marries and takes care of her mother until the mother's death. Instead, Mamá Elena suggests Pedro marry Tita's older sister Rosaura, and in a fateful miscalculation, Pedro accepts this plan to remain close to Tita. Tita, who was born in a kitchen and who possesses magical culinary skills thanks to years of working with the family's cook Nacha, infuses everything she makes for the family with emotions of joy, sorrow, love, anger, bitterness, and lust. This gift plays out dramatically at Rosaura's wedding. Throughout the novel, Mamá Elena encounters that bitterness in Tita's food, and learning dark secrets upon Mamá Elena's death, Tita finds that Mamá Elena had her share of bitterness and loss in life. (Though it makes Mamá Elena no less sympathetic to the reader, who sees only her unflinching cruelty to Tita.)

As historical fiction set against the backdrop of the Mexican Revolution, Like Water for Chocolate is perhaps most notable as a metaphor for emerging feminism and women's rights in Mexico. Tita marshalls her revolution against her mother and family tradition, and the expectations of women in her community. Even once Tita is free to marry, rather than marry a man who loves her but whom she is unsure she loves enough to be a worthy partner, she chooses to remain single and to forge her path, incendiary though it ultimately is. Unlike her sisters, both of whom are merely pawns in the machinations of men around them, Tita resolutely adheres to her path and strong moral center. At the book's conclusion, we find Tita's story has been told by her niece, Esperanza (Hope), entangled with the recipes that defined Tita and the de la Garza family history.

Overall, I find that Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate doesn't have the narrative strength of Allende or García Márquez, but it is still a rich confection.

Like Water for Chocolate was my May Classic Read for the blog.

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