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March
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- A Book Review on Nicholas Sparks' Dear John
- The God of Small Things: a Book Review by John Col...
- The Notebook
- Dear John: Nicholas Sparks' Tale of Love and Sacri...
- A Book Review on Nicholas Sparks' Dear John
- Nights in Rodanthe..
- A Walk to Remember
- A Walk to Remember
- Aretha Sarah F. Mamaradlo
- A Book Review on Laura Esquivel's Like Water for C...
- A Bend in the Road: Nicholas Sparks' Tale of True ...
- Paolo Coelho's By the River Piedra I Sat and Wept
- Book Review: Like Water For Chocolate
- When Hearts Heal: A Book Review of Nicholas Sparks...
- A Book Review on Laura Esquivel's Like Water for C...
- A Story of Spices and Love: A Book Review of Like ...
- A Book Review of Nicholas Sparks' A Bend in the Road
- A Bridge to the Stars
- Book Report in English: A Walk to Remember by Nich...
- A Summer to Die
- Book Review on Nicholas Spark’s A Walk to Remember...
- Women.....
- A Summer to Die
- A Feast for the Senses
- Book Review on A Summer To Die By: Jesseca Louise ...
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March
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ReplyDeleteA Book Review on Laura Esquivel's Like water for Chocolate
ReplyDelete“Like Water for Chocolate” is Laura Esquivel’s first novel yet it has been a great success for being awarded as a best-seller when it was first published in 1989. It has been translated into 30 different languages around the world and one of these is its translation to English which made the novel a best-seller. It gave the readers the exact excitement as the original Spanish version.
“Como agua para chocolate” is a common expression in Spanish-speaking countries which is “Like water to chocolate” when translated in English. This was the inspiration for Esquivel’s novel title. Like Water for Chocolate’s full title is Like Water for Hot Chocolate. In Latin American countries like Mexico, they use water instead of milk in making hot chocolate. At the boiling point of water, chocolate melts and that will be the hot chocolate. It is associated in the extremity of emotion in this novel such as anger, madness and passion. The book is composed of twelve chapters representing each month of a year which each month starts with a recipe. This novel showed Esquivel’s love for the kitchen and she believes that it is the most important part of a house because it is the source of knowledge and undertakings that brings pleasure.
The novel tells us about Tita De La Garza, the youngest in her family that long lived in Mexico and her suspense love story with Pedro Muzquiz. Due to a tradition which says that the youngest daughter must not marry and take care of the parents, she was not allowed to marry. This brought Pedro into a decision of marrying Rosaura, Tita’s older sister, just so he can be closer to Tita.
Tita has always loved the kitchen and as their family cook, Nacha, died, Tita replaced her position. She was not allowed to weep in front of her mother so she cries whenever she cooks. And whatever she was feeling while cooking, the people that will eat what she had cooked will feel the same way as she did.
As the story goes, Pedro fell into a spell of romance in Tita’s cooking. Rosaura has no skills in cooking and so it made Pedro unattracted to her more. Mama Elena noticed that Roberto, Rosaura and pedro’s son kind of make Tita and Pedro closer and so she asked the Pedro and Rosaura together with their son to go to a trip. Roberto died in the journey and when Tita found out about it, she blamed her mother for everything and that’s when Tita started disobeying her mother.
Tita continued living far from her mother and when she received a news that the ranch was attacked and that her mother died, she moved in back together with his fiancée Dr. john Brown. They lived there with Pedro and Rosaura. Rosaura gave birth to a baby girl and she was named Esperanza.
After the all obstacles to the relationship between Tita and Pedro are gone, the lovers finally share a night of bliss that is so heated and passionate that Pedro actually dies while making love to Tita. Upset that Pedro dies while she lives, leaving her alone in the world, Tita proceeds to consume matches whilst thinking of his face. The matches are sparked by the heat of his memory, creating a fire that engulfs them both, leading to their deaths in union and the total destruction of the ranch.
The narrator of this novel is the daughter of Esperanza. The narrator then says that all that was found under the smoldering rubble of the ranch was Tita's cookbook, which contained all the recipes described in the preceding chapters
This novel was full of symbolisms that made it more beautiful. It may not be realistic because of some magical and unexplainable events and it needed some logical thinking to understand some symbolism. It has it’s simplicity as its strength too. The story took place in Mexico and Spanish was its original language so people from other part of the world will not understand some of it if it was written in a more complicated way. The novel may not be realistic and it needed some logical thinking to understand some symbolism.
The book itself is perfectly capable of staying as it and changes are not needed anymore. It is a great book which is easy and fast to read and comprehensible book.
~Kimberly Saraza Felix
~IV-Albert Einstein
A Book Review on Laura Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate
ReplyDelete“Like Water for Chocolate” is Laura Esquivel’s first novel yet it has been a great success for being awarded as a best-seller when it was first published in 1989. It has been translated into 30 different languages around the world and one of these is its translation to English which made the novel a best-seller. It gave the readers the exact excitement as the original Spanish version.
“Como agua para chocolate” is a common expression in Spanish-speaking countries which is “Like water to chocolate” when translated in English. This was the inspiration for Esquivel’s novel title. Like Water for Chocolate’s full title is Like Water for Hot Chocolate. In Latin American countries like Mexico, they use water instead of milk in making hot chocolate. At the boiling point of water, chocolate melts and that will be the hot chocolate. It is associated in the extremity of emotion in this novel such as anger, madness and passion. The book is composed of twelve chapters representing each month of a year which each month starts with a recipe. This novel showed Esquivel’s love for the kitchen and she believes that it is the most important part of a house because it is the source of knowledge and undertakings that brings pleasure.
The novel tells us about Tita De La Garza, the youngest in her family that long lived in Mexico and her suspense love story with Pedro Muzquiz. Due to a tradition which says that the youngest daughter must not marry and take care of the parents, she was not allowed to marry. This brought Pedro into a decision of marrying Rosaura, Tita’s older sister, just so he can be closer to Tita.
Tita has always loved the kitchen and as their family cook, Nacha, died, Tita replaced her position. She was not allowed to weep in front of her mother so she cries whenever she cooks. And whatever she was feeling while cooking, the people that will eat what she had cooked will feel the same way as she did.
As the story goes, Pedro fell into a spell of romance in Tita’s cooking. Rosaura has no skills in cooking and so it made Pedro unattracted to her more. Mama Elena noticed that Roberto, Rosaura and pedro’s son kind of make Tita and Pedro closer and so she asked the Pedro and Rosaura together with their son to go to a trip. Roberto died in the journey and when Tita found out about it, she blamed her mother for everything and that’s when Tita started disobeying her mother.
Tita continued living far from her mother and when she received a news that the ranch was attacked and that her mother died, she moved in back together with his fiancée Dr. john Brown. They lived there with Pedro and Rosaura. Rosaura gave birth to a baby girl and she was named Esperanza.
After the all obstacles to the relationship between Tita and Pedro are gone, the lovers finally share a night of bliss that is so heated and passionate that Pedro actually dies while making love to Tita. Upset that Pedro dies while she lives, leaving her alone in the world, Tita proceeds to consume matches whilst thinking of his face. The matches are sparked by the heat of his memory, creating a fire that engulfs them both, leading to their deaths in union and the total destruction of the ranch.
The narrator of this novel is the daughter of Esperanza. The narrator then says that all that was found under the smoldering rubble of the ranch was Tita's cookbook, which contained all the recipes described in the preceding chapters
This novel was full of symbolisms that made it more beautiful. It may not be realistic because of some magical and unexplainable events and it needed some logical thinking to understand some symbolism. It has it’s simplicity as its strength too. The story took place in Mexico and Spanish was its original language so people from other part of the world will not understand some of it if it was written in a more complicated way. The novel may not be realistic and it needed some logical thinking to understand some symbolism.
The book itself is perfectly capable of staying as it and changes are not needed anymore. It is a great book which is easy and fast to read and comprehensible book.
~Kimberly Saraza Felix
~IV-Albert Einstein
Painstakingly Beautiful: A Book Review of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things
ReplyDeleteBy: ]essica Leal Manalili
“Who was he? Who could he have been? The God of loss. The God of Small Things.”
From a writer-cum-activist-cum-Sydney Peace Prize winner-cum-world citizen, Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things is unlike any other novel, not just because you want to quit reading for the first fifty pages but because you’ll congratulate yourself for having done so. Scandalous, tiring, serious, playful that is how I shall describe this novel. It reflects the soul of a wounded yet fighting woman, empowering the lives of her readers.
Reading a book has always been pleasurable, discovering its mysteries more. Mystery is the focal point of this novel, digging up the closet of an Indian family, its ruins, tragedies, disgrace. Introduced munificently by lavish description of the setting, a heavy cloud of deception has blocked the readers’ view of what is to come. It is the story of an Indian family as seen through the eyes of fraternal twins Estha and Rahel and how it has developed through numerous tragedies and scandal. (I shall not describe the plot because I want it to remain a mystery)
The author, having faced numerous lawsuits since the release of the novel, have struggled and met success. She has narrated the story in a childlike manner, playing with the words and thus stressing the “small things”. The “big things” however, (the moral issues, Marxism, the caste system) have still surfaced the story. Interwoven in a kaleidoscopic view, the different experiences of each character have created a neat, maximized story. Digesting the book will be hard for first time novel readers mainly because of its heavy mood. Grotesque and appalling, the views of the twins have been simple yet intelligent. The use of heavy descriptions matched the shallow, yet tragically meaningful lines of the children. The present-past twist of the book has also complicated reading the book. Starting at the end and ending in the middle. I had to turn back multiple times, just to clarify what I have discovered. The descriptive approach to the relationship among family members have also been unnerving. The unconditional love of Ammu (Rahel and Estha’s mother), the treacherous love of Baby Kochamma (the twins’Baby grandaunt), the pride of Papachi ( the twin’s grandfather), I could name the love of each character and yet taking it in will still be very simple. What makes it classically beautiful are the small things, those that go unnoticed, undiscovered, until they become big and recklessly volatile. The book has been a written, unwritten satire.
The book have left no suggestive ideas, but because of its twisted timeline, it has been hard to understand the events happening. It has been very creative and I shall emphasize long, having been written in the span of four years, it really has a history book quality. I have gained information on Marxism, the caste system, the Christians, and the anglophiles. Descriptively, I have digested morbid, sexual, violent, soothing scenes all of which overwhelmed me.
I have loved the book, because of the effort that has been put into it. Because of the story, I am a fan of a complete story, and never of a hanging one. The title character, Velutha, has been my favorite. He has dared to surpass the limit of his status (untouchable) and have proved no barrier is impenetrable but of course with consequences. This novel has given me headache and satisfaction. It has stirred my argumentative nature. I have wondered how sexual acts could rule a story and change a life in a day, and this story has confirmed my queries.
Nonetheless, a good read.