Magical Realism In Like Water For Chocolate

In Chocolat, I learned that food has magical power that engages and connects people and brings them into good relations. Vianne and her daughter were not welcomed in a conservative and religious town at beginning, however her chocolate had magical power to melt those peoples’ cold attitude and they became drawn into her chocolate, even that stubborn pastor Reynaud who had strong hostile feeling against Vianne did so at the end. I liked the part that Reynaud couldn’t resist to break in her store and try all the chocolates before Easter Sunday. “It is like one of my dreams. I roll in chocolates. I imagine myself in a field of chocolates, on a beach of chocolates, basking-rooting-gorging. I have no time to read the labels; I cram chocolates
Magic Realism is an aesthetic style or genre of fiction in which magical elements blend with the real world. The story explains these magical elements as real occurrences, presented in a straightforward manner that places the "real" and the "fantastic" in the same stream of thought. I enjoyed reading this novel from very beginning with Tita’s dramatic birth in kitchen. Her tide of tears on her birth becomes lots of salt to be used for cooking later on. “Tita was literally washed into this world on a great tide of tears that spilled over the edge of the table and flooded across the kitchen floor” (Esquivel 6). “That afternoon, when the uproar had subsided and the water had been dried up by the sun, Nacha swept up the residue the tears had left on the red stone floor. There was enough salt to fill a ten-pound sack-it was used for cooking and lasted a long time” (Esquirel 6). I like this part because Tita not only has a big passion over cooking, but also she could produce an ingredient –salt by her own, which has an important role later on. I enjoyed reading the part that the wedding cake Tita made for her sister makes every single guest feels longing, intoxicated and frustrated at the wedding. Tita’s love over Pedro was so strong and her poison: tears in the cake made everyone become sick. “The moment they took their first bite of the cake, everyone was flooded with a great wave of longing. […] But the weeping was just the first symptom of a strange intoxication- an acute attack of pain and frustration- that seized the guests and scattered them across the patio and the grounds and in the bathrooms, all of them wailing over lost love” (Esquirel