Like Water for Chocolate

I've been casting around all week for a book that would hold my attention; finally, in a thrift store near the National Cathedral, I found this book.

It sent me back to college and our World Lit class--I think that I was a junior or senior when I took the class and I arranged to take it with most of my best friends. We had to do presentations for the class on books that the class didn't read, and one of my friends presented on this book. Incidentally, the teacher of that class was the blondest teacher I've ever had--she was a spousal hire, and it made me wonder about those.

This book is really wonderful--it's full of magical realism, a style I'm growing to love. It's broken down into chapters according to months, with each chapter framed by a recipe that that chapter describes, in addition to an associated narrative. It's full of sexuality and grief and loads of weirdness--when the main character cooks, her emotions go into the food and affect all of the people who eat it; people also routinely come back from the dead to talk with other characters throughout the novel--just because a character dies doesn't mean he's gone from the story!

The novel explores women's connection to cooking and to bearing and feeding children. Women in the novel are also connected closely to tradition. We see both good and bad traditions in the novel: Tita, the main character, learns to cook excellent family recipes, a skill that could only be learned from a teacher and not from a recipe. Tita, however, is excruciatingly harmed by her family's tradition of having the youngest daughter remain single to care for her mother. Tita questions this tradition and finally encourages her niece to break it.

In conclusion, I must note that reading this book required me to temporarily lift my moratorium on books in which sisters are involved with the same man.

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