Like Water for Chocolate

If you liked...Suggestions for further reading

Like Water for Chocolate

• Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1970)
  For readers who enjoyed the mixture of magic and reality, Garcia Marquez is the quintessential author of magical realism. Critics and fans of Like Water for Chocolate all cite Garcia Marquez, and this novel in particular, as an inspiration for Esquivel’s mixture of sense and enchantment. It follows the Buendia family and their village for one hundred years, and in their history the reader finds a microcosm of mankind.
• Isabel Allende, Aphrodite: A memoir of the senses (1999)
  For those who enjoyed reading of the sensual pleasures found in food, Aphrodite has been cited as building upon Like Water for Chocolate and becoming the climax of the erotic-culinary novel. It is catalogued as a non-fiction book of recipes for aphrodisiacs or love potions. Allende gives more than 100 recipes with aphrodisiacal anecdotes, noted by Amazon.com to quickly put you in an apron and perhaps little more. Other novels by Allende will also satisfy Esquivel’s readers who love the Latin-American literary tradition.
• Alice Hoffman, Practical Magic (1995)
  Hoffman’s writing style is sometimes called “Yankee magical realism”. Practical Magic, which like Like Water for Chocolate has also been made into a popular movie, includes some of the same important elements as Esquivel’s novel: powerful women, familial identity through cooking, passion, curse, and of course magic. Like Tita, the protagonist of Practical Magic is limited from meeting full romantic potential by a generations-long tradition/curse, and must return to the matriarchal setting to find her self and break that curse. Hoffman is a lighter alternative for an Esquivel read-alike.
• Joanna Harris, Five Quarters of the Orange (2001)
  Joanna Harris is a fantastic lover of the mixture of food and literature. She is best known for Chocolat (1999), which is also a fine read-alike for Like Water for Chocolate. In Five Quarters of the Orange, though, a reader will be satisfied if he/she is searching for the darker aspects they loved in Esquivel’s novel. Framboise, the protagonist, returns to her childhood home, opens up a restaurant there, and relives her traumatic childhood (during Germany’s occupation of France) through the cooking of her mother’s recipes.
• Daniel Wallace, Big Fish: a novel of mythic proportions (1998)
  Those who enjoyed Esquivel’s novel but grasped tightly onto their skepticism: constantly finding explanation for the magical events or calling them hyperbole, will enjoy Big Fish. It’s the skeptic’s novel of magical realism. The narrator is the skeptical son of a legendary man. He seeks to make sense of the myths that surrounded his father’s life as his father lay dying. While Big Fish was also made into a movie, there are many plot changes in the film version.
• Elena Poniatowska, Las soldaderas (2006)
  For readers who are intrigued by the Mexican feminism revolution, and by the Mexican revolution, Las Soldaderas is a non-fiction book about the female soldiers who fought in Mexico’s revolution. It is heavily peppered with photographs. Poniatowska also wrote a fictional book about soldaderas as well: Here's to You, Jesusa! (1969).
• Edwidge Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994)
  Danticat’s novel also combines feminine suppression, cultural traditions, and the difficulties that women from oppressive families encounter when trying to find themselves. The protagonist if Breath, Eyes, Memory is a baby born from rape. She is raised mostly by an aunt in Haiti, but at age 12 is forced to move to America to live with her still-emotionally-scarred mother. It is a much darker and more emotionally complex novel than Like Water for Chocolate; more about finding oneself than loving another.

Major Character List

Like Water for Chocolate

• Tita – protagonist. Youngest daughter in her family whose tradition requires her to remain unmarried to care for her mother as she ages. Struggles nevertheless to find love and her self.
• Mama Elena – Tita’s mother. Rigid, dictatorial matriarch of the de le Garza family.
• Pedro – Love of Tita’s life, marries her elder sister in order to be closer to her.
• Rosaura – Tita’s elder sister, scared of the kitchen, marries Pedro.
• Gertrudis – Tita’s eldest sister, loved music and dancing, is so affected by the sensuality infused in one dish that she catches the shower on fire and runs off naked with a soldier of the rebel army
• Nacha – elderly Indian cook of the de la Garza family. Raised Tita in her tradition of cooking.
• Chencha – a servant in the de la Garza family.
• Dr. John Brown – the American doctor who cares for Tita when she experiences a breakdown.
• Morninglight – Dr. Brown’s Kikapu Indian grandmother who taught him natural remedies
• Esperanza – Rosaura and Pedro’s second child – doomed to follow the same tradition as Tita
• Alex – Dr. Brown’s son
• Narrator – revealed as the child of Alex and Esperanza, carries on Tita’s cooking legacy

Discussion Questions

Like Water for Chocolate

1. The style of writing Esquivel uses in Like Water for Chocolate is called magical realism. Were you able to divorce yourself from the rules of reality to understand the magical realism of the novel? What do you think is the difference between this style of writing and simple hyperbole? Did the author use it effectively?
2. In the interview attached, Esquivel notes that Mama Elena is a “castrating woman” (for example, her encounter with the rebel soldiers p. 90). With such a powerful woman as matriarch, and no men in the family at all, why were the de la Garza women still forced into such traditional roles?
3. What do you think of Pedro’s choice to take Rosaura as his wife? Why didn’t he fight for Tita?
4. One of the most memorable images of the novel, and one of the first truly magical moments, is when Gertrudis (p. 52) is so overwhelmed as the conductor of the sexual message between Tita and Pedro, that she literally catches the shower stall on fire and the scent of her body calls to a rebel soldier to come rescue her from her lascivious fury. Critics of the novel say this scene caters to a male sexual fantasy and is an affront to the feminist purpose of the novel. Fans (and the author, in the attached interview) say that it is rather a sexual liberation and asserts her feminism. Where do you stand?
5. Were you surprised by Mama Elena’s secret love affair with the mulatto Jose Trevino (p. 137)?
6. Pedro finally succumbed to his love for Tita after learning she was engaged to John Brown (p. 158). Why do you think he chose that evening? Does his choice of timing demean his love for her?
7. Compare the couples in the novel: Tita and Pedro, Rosaura and Pedro, Tita and John Brown, Gertrudis and Juan (the rebel soldier), and Mama Elena’s two affairs: with the mulatto and her husband. The only one that lasted happily (on this earth) was Gertrudis and Juan. Why?
8. The title of the novel comes from a phrase “like water for chocolate” meaning “boiling”, or “ready to boil over”. Typically it has a sexual connotation. You probably paid special attention, then, to the recipe for chocolate on pages177-178. Who do you think is most “like water for chocolate” in the novel?
9. Dr. Brown gives Tita the metaphor that the body’s passion is like a box of matches. It must be lit one at a time and not be blown out (p.115) – it needs not be lit all at once either, or the flames will consume the body and kill it. What does Tita take from this lesson?
10. At the end of the novel, the de la Garza ranch is set aflame as Tita’s body is consumed by fire. The ranch burned for a week, and under the ashes Esperanza found Tita’s cookbook. Why do you think the author chose to burn the entire ranch?