Chocolat by Joanne Harris
Following the wind, Vianne Rocher and her daughter Anouk’s advent into the town of Lansquenet, France, sparks a renaissance in the sleepy town. Vianne’s uncatholic, pagan beliefs in scrying, divination and tarot irritate the priest Reynaud and his followers, especially since she used her beliefs and intuition to find out villager’s troubles, and sooth them with gifts of chocolate from her chocolaterie.
The gypsies sailing into town only cemented the priest’s hatred of her. According to him, gypsies thieved, brought disease, and stirred the villagers up. She supported the gypsies; she helped a woman leave her abusive husband; she befriended the atheist madwoman of the town. Reynaud took Vianne as a personal affront, making it a crusade to get his supporters to boycott her business and run her out of the city. But Vianne did well enough to have a chocolate festival. She decided to hold a chocolate festival on Easter Sunday.
The priest is outraged – such sinful decadence during the time they hold their Lenten fast? Maddened by lack of food and too angry to think clearly, he breaks into her store the night before the festival, intending to smash her chocolates. Instead, he caves in, tasting one chocolate, then another, a third, a fourth, till the bells ring on Easter Sunday and he is discovered asleep in the display window, to all appearances having gorged on chocolates in an orgy of pleasure that he always denounced. Humiliated, he runs to his house while Vianne’s chocolate festival begins.
The wind changes, calling her. Does she follow? Or has she found a home in Lansquenet? Pleasantly vague, the book doesn’t say whether or not Vianne stays in the happy town, now that the controlling priest who put his own interpretation on religion is gone.
In ending, a dark, deep, enjoyable read. 8/10. Chick lit warning for the gents!
Chocolate by Joanne Harris - The dark aspect of different type of magic
Although we all are familiar with charms of well cooked food and not once we heard about cooking as a magic, very little of us have seen this kind of a magic as a connector between events in the book and makes her content one whole.
Two narrators of a books (The Priest and Vianne) are telling as about a story which needs to be told in the book. Two of them are looking from their own angle on a events in Lansquenet-sous-Tannes. The mindset of The Priest is dark and indicates a certain psychological trauma and Vianne's mind set carries a secret when some of her lines makes you wonder what is it that made her come in this village and what makes her move abound the world so often.
"The Chocolate" is a new contribution to a magic realism and for that the book brings a certain charms from an imaginary world to a real world.
The story begins when the Vianne moves in Lansquenet-sous-Tannes with her daughter Anouk and opens a Chocolaterie in a time of a lent and fasting. The people of a village is not very pleased with this and finds it unappropriated but Vianne plans a "Grand Festival of Chocolate" which takes place on Easter Sunday. Vianne has a very few friends there and a lots of enemies. She begins a friendship with a "river rats", the traveling group of ramblers. Through her staying she faces with petty-bourgeois gossips, close-minded people but also with a love which she couldn't foresee.
Even the book has her dark aspects it carries a certain warmth which follows you unaccountably through reading. For me, it is a must-have.