Book Review: Chocolat

"We came on the wind of the carnival. A warm wind for February, laden with the hot greasy scents of frying pancakes and sausages and powdery-sweet waffles cooked on the hot plat right there by the roadside with the confetti sleeting down colors and cuffs and rolling in the gutters like and idiot antidote to winter." -Joanne Harris

Because why not review nearly 30 year old novel. While I do not consider myself Catholic, every Lenten season I do a read of Chocolat by Joanne Harris. Why you ask? Because that's when the novel takes place. In the course of the story we move from mid-February to late March in southern France and the carnival wind that is mentioned often starts here in Michigan as well. I call it witchy weather, those gusts of wind that you can feel the change in seasons in-paradoxically bringing in the warmth of spring and summer.

We begin the story with Vianne Rocher and her daughter, Anouk, arriving to the village of Lansquenet-sous-Tannes on Mardi Gras in the late 90s. Having inherited the lifestyle from her late mother, Vianne lives the life of an itinerant, never staying in one place long and moving all over Europe. Joanne does a great job balancing the glamour and reality of such a lifestyle and manifests it Vianne's reluctance to move along as quickly as her mother always did. Throughout the story, our main character's childhood is unveiled, showing us the fear that drove her mother to flee all over Europe and eventually to New York. Vianne keeps up with this roving lifestyle, but stays in France, deciding to move to Lansquenet and open a chocolate shop, causing the main friction of the story with the conservative village priest. 

You see it's not appropriate to have such indulgences during Lent, the traditional season of fasting and restraint. This clash of lifestyles is magnified by the fact that Vianne is a witch, although you'll never catch her using the term, she just wants to make people happy. Her shop, La Celeste Praline, becomes the battle ground between the people who prefer the status quo and those who could benefit from such a shakeup. We meet Josephine, a woman suffering from domestic abuse who steals as a coping mechanism. Armande, the oldest village resident, whose estrangement from her queen bee daughter means she rarely sees her grandson. Guillaume, the retired schoolmaster, who is struggling with the aging and death of his beloved dog, to which Pere Reynaud has little sympathy for.

While Vianne and Reynaud have a contentious relationship, mostly on Reynaud's end, the plot gets more tense with the arrival of the river folk; fellow itinerants who have been demonized by the church and the 'upright citizens'. You will have drug dealers, layabouts, and even Arabs in your community! They are slovenly and bring crime and disease. While Reynaud could barely tolerate Vianne, the river folk are a step too far, especially when they are aided by Vianne and Armand. This is when he starts to plot on how to get rid of Vianne and the travelers both. As Easter draws nearer, will Reynaud succeed in driving out Vianne or will Vianne win the heart of the community and stay?

“There is a kind of alchemy in the transformation of base chocolate into this wise fool's-gold, a layman's magic that even my mother might have relished. As I work, I clear my mind, breathing deeply. The windows are open, and the through-draft would be cold if it were not for the heat of the stoves, the copper pans, the rising vapor from the melting couverture. The mingled scents of chocolate, vanilla, heated copper, and cinnamon are intoxicating, powerfully suggestive; the raw and earthy tang of the Americas, the hot and resinous perfume of the rain forest. This is how I travel now, as the Aztecs did in their sacred rituals: Mexico, Venezuela, Columbia. The court of Montezuma. Cortez and Columbus. The Food of the Gods, bubbling and frothing in ceremonial goblets. The bitter elixir of life.”

Chocolat, is one of my favorite books. I have read it every year since I got my copy as a Christmas gift when I was 15. Which makes me wonder how much my parents paid attention to the summary, because they are very Catholic. Why does this book resonate so much? Well for one, the writing is lovely. Chocolat is written in two perspectives, Vianne and Reynaud, and the voices are clear and distinct. The cadence and vocabulary clearly mark their world views and perspectives and it makes for easy reading. The real draw is the descriptions of cooking; from Vianne's hand-tempering of chocolate, to the feasts she makes for the community she builds, to Reynaud's fixation on food and fasting, the preparation of food is a strong aspect of the novel. 

Yet for all the attention to food, the nature of community and creating roots is also a strong theme of the novel. 

“I envy the table its scars, the scorch marks caused by the hot bread tins. I envy its calm sense of time, and I wish I could say: I did this five years ago. I made this mark, this ring caused by a wet coffee cup, this cigarette burn, this ladder of cuts against the wood’s coarse grain."

Vianne is torn between creating a stable life for her and her daughter, but also can't ignore the nomadic lifestyle, embodied as the wind, that she grew up with. For all that she can make connections with some villagers easily, she still can't bring herself to fully immerse herself in being a resident of Lansquenet. She even brings up her outsider status as a way to connect with the river folk when they first arrive. 

In addition to Vianne's struggle to settle down, we have the larger conflict in the town-the behaviors and persons that are deemed acceptable. Josephine is looked down by the fellow women for not having a child, a gardener has friction with the priest over church attendance, Vianne not hiding the fact that her daughter Anouk is not a product of marriage. Reynaud, as the town priest in late 1990s France in a small rural village, holds considerable sway still and tries to appeal to traditional values to maintain a status quo that can't keep up with the changing times. 

Vianne's fierce love of Anouk is part of the reason she is so conflicted, she sees how much Anouk thrives in Lansquenet, but is also terrified of losing her. She inherits her mother's fear of The Black Man, an embodiment of death and authority, and it's her determination to defeat him, embodied in Reynaud, that keeps her on the somewhat adversarial path she takes up. She marvels at the insight, and abilities Anouk has and remarks that their roles sometimes reverses, a thing that she tries to prevent. With Anouk making friends with the village children, Vianne has to come to terms that she cannot be everything for her daughter, as much as she would like to be. 

“At such times I feel I could die for love of her, my little stranger, my heart swelling dangerously so that the only release is to run too, my red coat flapping around my shoulders like wings, my hair a comet’s tail in the patchy blue sky.”

 At 300 some-odd pages, Chocolat is a quick read that contains a lot to think about. It's vivid depiction of village life, it's loving attention to food, and the care put into multiple perspectives all end up creating a rich, well-rounded reading experience that leaves you wanting to visit. Even if it's just for a short while. I pulled what feels like a lot of quotes, because there are so many exquisite phrases and passages. to read them quietly or out loud is a wonderful experience. It's not all positive musings on a nomadic life, and village life can be quite provincial and small-minded, but most of the characters come out the end of the story a little bit better. 

This is the first in a series, I imagine Joanne realized this is her bread and butter like Alice Hoffman did with the Practical Magic books., but I highly recommend you check out her other novels. The 3rd book, Peaches for Father Francis, is my second favorite in the series, but the prequel Vianne was also very enjoyable. For Joanne's other novels, I cannot recommend Honeycomb enough, although it's a very different reading experience as a collection of fairy tales. For something more like Chocolat, Five Quarters of the Orange is a great novel that also has a focus on food. I'll leave you with this quote that really sums up love of cooking and Vianne's internal conflict so well. 

“This is an art I can enjoy. There is a kind of sorcery in all cooking; in the choosing of ingredients, the process of mixing, grating, melting, infusing, and flavoring, the recipes taken from ancient books, the traditional utensils- the pestle and mortar with which my mother made her incense turned to a more homely purpose, her spices and aromatics giving up their subtleties to a baser, more sensual magic. And it is partly the transience of it delights me; so much loving preparation, so much art and experience, put into a pleasure that can last only a moment, and which only a few will ever fully appreciate. My mother always viewed my interest with indulgent contempt. To her, food was no pleasure but a tiresome necessity to be worried over, a tax on the price of our freedom. I stole menus from restaurants and looked longingly into patisserie windows. I must have been ten years old- maybe older- before I first tasted real chocolate. But still the fascination endured. I carried recipes in my head like maps. All kinds of recipes: torn from abandoned magazines in busy railway stations, wheedled from people on the road, strange marriages of my own confection. Mother with her cards, her divinations, directed our mad course across Europe. Cookery cards anchored us, placed landmarks on the bleak borders. Paris smells of baking bread and croissants; Marseille of bouillabaisse and grilled garlic. Berlin was Eisbrei with sauerkraut and Kartoffelsalat, Rome was the ice cream I ate without paying in a tiny restaurant beside the river.”