Laura Esquivel’s Mexican Fictions: Like Water for Chocolate, The Law of Love, Swift as Desire, Malinche: A Novel (review)

Laura Esquivel’s Mexican Fictions brings together insightful, significant essays on Esquivel’s works. The book’s preliminary section describes each of the essays, enabling the reader to focus on those that pertain to his/her interest. The work is truly a pleasure to read from beginning to end; it avoids an overly specialized jargon and provides a glossary of terms and abbreviations related, for the most part, to vocabulary present in the works analyzed.

The first essay in the collection, a forty-five page historiographical presentation of relevant criticism of Esquivel’s works by Elizabeth Willingham, provides a wealth of reference material for scholars. Equally important, the second essay—Elena Poniatowska’s—focuses on Como agua para chocolate (1989) and highlights how the work is based on family traditions and how these traditions are often intertwined with food. The next essay, written by Patrick Duffey, provides a reading of Como agua para chocolate as a subversion of domination and traditional gender roles in cinematic melodrama produced during the 40s and 50s. Duffey successfully supports his thesis by exposing that only female characters are main protagonists of the novel and that the text portrays a postmodern perspective of the character of the prostitute.

Also analyzing Como agua para chocolate, Jeffrey Oxford theorizes that the active roles of female characters are consistent representations of the matriarchy that is actually predominant in Mexican society. From a distinct analytical approach, Stephen Murray asserts that, for the reader interested in theological issues, Como agua para chocolate portrays a family’s life in the absence of God and how the presence of ancestors in the novel fills the void.

On the other hand, María Christie’s essay differentiates itself from other essays in this collection, not only by providing photos that illustrate parallels between the lives of real women in Xochimilco and the lives of the fictitious characters represented in the novel, but also because of the variety of related subjects her essay explores, which include gendered spaces and ecology. The last analysis of Como agua para chocolate is provided by Debra Andrist, who examines how Alicia Ostriker’s model concerning women’s writing manifests itself in the novel.

The next two essays analyze Esquivel’s La ley del amor (1995). Elizabeth Martínez reads this novel as a continuation of the search for understanding Mexican identity. Martínez highlights the author’s innovative techniques and compares her with Julio Cortázar in terms of the originality of her writing; she goes as far as to describe the novel as the beginning of a new genre, one which unites ancient indigenous cosmology with modern culture. Martínez’s essay includes a variety of critical approaches that range from genre theory to an examination of the representations of nature present in the text. The paper is useful to the researcher interested in Esquivel’s works as it provides questions that require further analysis, questions such as determining the particular philosophical views that the text supports and inquiries related to nature. While Martínez suggests that La ley del amor is the beginning of a new genre, Lydia Rodríguez classifies that work as science fiction and provides a pragmatic and clearly structured analysis of the work, utilizing Robert Scholes’s theory of structural fabulation and Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation to support her argument.

Examining Tan veloz como el deseo (2001), Elizabeth Willingham provides a reading of that work as a new allegory of Mexico. She successfully contends that that text is a microcosm of Mexico’s society, economy, and culture with the underlying theme of attempting to understand the present through the past. Willingham’s treatment of Tan veloz como el deseo is the only essay in the compendium that addresses that novel.

The next two essays focus on the representation of Malinalli...