The Biblio Blogazine

Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel
Magical Realism, 246 pages (Hardcover edition)
Spanish Edition (1989)
English Translation (1992)
Random House, Inc.

 Like Water for Chocolate’s full title is, Like Water for Hot Chocolate: A novel in monthly installments with recipes, romances and home remedies. However it is much more than a “diary” recounting the life of a beloved aunt.

This book is about relationships: those between a family of women and the challenges borne out of sibling love and rivalry; those affected by a family tradition that is the catalyst for rebellion; and of those between women and the men who pass through their lives.

The setting plays an important part in Esquivel’s narrative, as it mirrors the lives of her characters. It is turn-of-the-century Mexico. A time of revolution and change. Not only in politics, but in the culture as well. This is clear to see within the family of the De La Garza women as the story moves along from one generation to the next: How they, and the times change, some adapting – some not.

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 The House of The Spirits by Isabel Allende (1982)
 Translated from the Spanish by Magda Bogin
 Magical Realism, 448 pages
 The Dial Press a division of Random House, Inc.

Synopsis taken from the author’s website:
The House of The Spirits is the magnificent epic of the Trueba family – their loves, their ambitions, their spiritual quests, their relations with one another, and their participation in the history of their times, a history that becomes destiny and overtakes them all.

If word of mouth or reviews do not convince someone to read this novel, the opening sentences will. They immediately draw the reader in, and prepare them for what they are about to read:

Barrabás came to us by sea, the child Clara wrote in her delicate calligraphy. She was already in the habit of writing down important matters, and afterward, when she was mute, she also recorded trivialities, never suspecting hat fifty years later I would use her notebooks to reclaim the past and overcome terrors of my own.

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