Desire for Chocolate
Desire for Chocolate comes to American readers with international accolades, and it’s certainly an ambitious book. Rather than being about a character, it’s about an 18th-century chocolate pot. Readers follow the bone-china pot backwards through the centuries via a series of vignettes. We meet Sara, the last in a line of Barcelonan chocolatiers, who adheres more closely to tradition in her chocolate-making than in her personal life. In the 19th century, the pot passes through the hands of Aurora, the maid to a wealthy family, and, in the 18th, Victor, a love-struck French secretary, gifts the pot to a chocolatier who has invented a mechanized chocolate mill. Through these stories, we learn the origin of every chip and crack and come closer to discovering the beginning of its story.
In the pot’s journey, we trace the history of chocolate in Europe, from liquid chocolate made from hand-ground beans to blocks of solid milk chocolate to bitter chocolate truffles. Though Santos writes so that the reader can practically smell the cocoa bean, the book’s strength doesn’t come from detail, as in much historical fiction, but rather from the narration and the sense of past that it evokes.
This isn’t a novel by any conventional definition. It isn’t even, in this reader’s opinion, an interconnected set of novellas. The narration of each is distinct—Sara’s is told in a crisp third person, present-tense, Aurora’s in a somewhat melodramatic second person, and Victor in an entertaining first person epistolary voice—and reminiscent of their own era’s literature. This difference in narration can lead to a disconnected feeling overall, but each part, when appreciated on its own, is impressive. Recommended to those who read to appreciate prose and history.
