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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Feb 1999, 304 pages
Paperback:
Jan 2000, 306 pages
A timeless novel of a straitlaced village's awakening to joy and sensuality - every page offers a description of chocolate to melt in the mouths of chocoholics, francophiles, armchair gourmets, cookbook readers, and lovers of passion everywhere.
Illuminating Peter Mayle's South of France with a touch of Laura
Esquivel's magic realism, Chocolat is a timeless novel of a
straitlaced village's awakening to joy and sensuality. In tiny Lansquenet,
where nothing much has changed in a hundred years, beautiful newcomer
Vianne Rocher and her exquisite chocolate shop arrive and instantly begin
to play havoc with Lenten vows. Each box of luscious bonbons comes with a
free gift: Vianne's uncanny perception of its buyer's private discontents
and a clever, caring cure for them. Is she a witch? Soon the parish no
longer cares, as it abandons itself to temptation, happiness, and a
dramatic face-off between Easter solemnity and the pagan gaiety of a
chocolate festival.
Chocolat's every page offers a description of
chocolate to melt in the mouths of chocoholics, francophiles, armchair
gourmets, cookbook readers, and lovers of passion everywhere. It's a must
for anyone who craves an escapist read, and is a bewitching gift for any
holiday.
Chapter One
February 11.
Shrove Tuesday
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 plate right there by the roadside, with the confetti sleeting down collars and cuffs and rolling in the gutters like an idiot antidote to winter. There is a febrile excitement in the crowds that line the narrow main street, necks craning to catch sight of the crêpe-covered char with its trailing ribbons and paper rosettes. Anouk watches, eyes wide, a yellow balloon in one hand and a toy trumpet in the other, from between a shopping basket and a sad brown dog. We have seen carnivals before, she and I; a procession of two hundred and fifty of the decorated chars in Paris last Mardi Gras, a hundred and eighty in New York, two dozen marching bands in Vienna, clowns on stilts, the Grosses Têtes with their lolling papier-mâché heads, drum majorettes ...
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