In the narrative of a magic realism novel the reader is lulled by the mundane setting only to be imminently shocked by the outrageous and improbable mystery of the events detailed. A woman sends her lover tokens of her affection. This receipt of a series of sighs and valentines prompts him to gorge his amorous appetite on roses, leaving him literally lovesick to the point that he exhibits symptoms of cholera. This sequence of events from Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera (1985) typifies the literature of the genre, where the prosaic is transformed into the extraordinary.
Magic realism in literature differs from fantasy as it foregrounds the fantastical and impossible elements against the backdrop of a recognisable normal world, complete with credible characters and communities. This blending of the magical and realistic creates a distinct atmosphere for the world of the novel, and often allows for a deeper understanding of the motivations and emotions of the characters.
This mode of writing was made popular by the likes of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jorge Luis Borges and in 1989 Laura Esquivel added her name to the roster with the release of her novel Like Water for Chocolate. As a hybrid of novel and cookbook, the text is immediately atypical.
The hypnotic plot complexities give rise to a narrative drive that propels the reader on, yet this is offset by its temporal fluidity and timelessness; moments are stretched out over pages while the lapse of years can occur over mere sentences. The cumulative effect of these narrative contradictions is to create a singular type of novel in which the reader is captivated with phenomenal ease.
Tita de la Garza is our fraught protagonist, the youngest girl in a Mexican family. She is born amid a flood of her mother’s tears, a deluge that establishes how the tone her life will become a literal tide of melancholy. Her mother tells her “You know perfectly well that being the youngest daughter means you have to take care of me until the day I die” and so Tita’s loveless fate is sealed. She is left to fight against this antiquated family tradition, in spite of her passionate love for Pedro, the man who goes on to marry her older sister Rosaura.
The flood of tears subsequently dry to leave ten pounds of salt, which is collected and saved for culinary reuse. This practical repurposing normalises the bizarre circumstances of Tita’s birth; the magical is accepted as custom. Furthermore, it introduces the cornerstone of the novel: the kitchen. Tita is secluded with her culinary pursuits and they become an outlet for her emotional energy, leading her to create food potently imbued with her feelings. Her wept tears in the tamale mix served for Pedro and Rosaura’s wedding makes everyone who eats it violently unwell.
Laura Esquivel remodels the magic realism made famous by Gabriel Garcia Marquez for a more explicitly female Latin American context, bringing it into the kitchen. In Mexico at the beginning of the twentieth century, women upheld the role of carer for their fathers and brothers, until marriage, where their caretaking shifted to their husbands and children. The tradition of Mexican society is woven into the intricacies and customs observed in the novel and is alternately viewed as a source of solace and strife, as both the catapult of Tita’s passion for cooking as well as her barricade from Pedro.
The beginning of each chapter details a new recipe that is then incorporated into the ensuing action, thus etching the cooking tradition into the workings of the novel. These recipes are as embedded in the work as they are in the de la Garza family, having passed through generations upon generations.
In the novel’s closing chapter, Esquivel describes Rosaura’s death as a microseism: “The floor was shaking, the light blinked off and on” as she seems to depress to her expiry in a quaking frenzy. This hectic action foreshadows the unbridled ecstasy to come between Pedro and Tita where ‘la petite mort’ of the orgasm is literalised into Pedro dying during sex. In the aftermath, Tita takes refuge in the enormous bedspread she has woven over the course of the novel “through night after night of solitude and insomnia”. The quilt “covered the whole ranch, all three hectares” and these implausible proportions stress the elongation of her strife. Beyond that, this blanketed space of the ranch is inextricably linked to Tita, as well as to her profoundly troubled life. This clear ranch perimeter to her existence is contrasted with the boundless nature of the magic realism genre in the novel itself, where the place Tita and Pedro can now be united is past these three hectares and this life she has been trapped in.
The recognisable star-crossed lovers trope is injected with the inexplicable in magic realism, pulling from the likes of dreams, fairy tales and mythology. It gives rise to a mosaic of beautiful surprises that alter the everyday occurrences of this Mexican family and construct an exquisite charm to even the most tragic of circumstances over the passage of decades in the de la Garza household.
