Summary
A tantalising novel about the ultimate luxury and sin: that dark mistress, chocolate.Try me...Test me...Taste me.When an exotic stranger, Vianne Rocher, arrives in the French village of Lansquenet and opens a chocolate boutique directly opposite the church, Father Reynaud identifies her as a serious danger to his flock – especially as it is the beginning of Lent, the traditional season of self-denial. War is declared as the priest denounces the newcomer's wares as instruments of murder.Suddenly Vianne's shop-cum-cafe means that there is somewhere for secrets to be whispered, grievances to be aired, dreams to be tested. But Vianne's plans for an Easter Chocolate Festival divide the whole community in a conflict that escalates into a 'Church not Chocolate' battle. As mouths water in anticipation, can the solemnity of the Church compare with the pagan passion of a chocolate eclair?For the first time here is a novel in which chocolate enjoys its true importance, emerging as a moral issue, as an agent of transformation – as well as a pleasure bordering on obsession. Rich, clever and mischievous, this is a triumphant read.
From the publisher
When the exotic stranger Vianne Rocher arrives in the old French village of Lansquenet and opens a chocolate boutique called La Celeste Praline directly across the square from the church, Father Reynaud identifies her as a serious danger to his flock. It is the beginning of Lent: the traditional season of self-denial. The priest says she'll be out of business by Easter.
To make matters worse, Vianne does not go to church and has a penchant for superstition. Like her mother, she can read Tarot cards. But she begins to win over customers with her smiles, her intuition for everyone's favourites, and her delightful confections. Her shop provides a place, too, for secrets to be whispered, grievances aired. She begins to shake up the rigid morality of the community. Vianne's plans for an Easter Chocolate Festival divide the whole community. Can the solemnity of the Church compare with the pagan passion of a chocolate eclair? For the first time, here is a novel in which chocolate enjoys its true importance, emerging as an agent of transformation. Rich, clever, and mischievous, reminiscent of a folk tale or fable, this is a triumphant read with a memorable character at its heart.
Says Harris: You might see [Vianne] as an archetype or a mythical figure. I prefer to see her as the lone gunslinger who blows into the town, has a showdown with the man in the black hat, then moves on relentless. But on another level she is a perfectly real person with real insecurities and a very human desire for love and acceptance. Her qualities too -- kindness, love, tolerance -- are very human. Vianne and her young daughter Anouk, come into town on Shrove Tuesday. Carnivals make us uneasy, says Harris, because of what they represent: the residual memory of blood sacrifice (it is after all from the word carne that the term arises), of pagan celebration. And they represent a loss of inhibition; carnival time is a time at which almost anything is possible. The book became an international best-seller, and was optioned to film quickly. The Oscar-nominated movie, with its star-studded cast including Juliette Binoche (The English Patient) and Judi Dench (Shakespeare in Love), was directed by Lasse Hallstrom, whose previous film The Cider House Rules (based on a John Irving novel) also looks at issues of community and moral standards, though in a less lighthearted vein.
The idea for the book came from a comment her husband made one day while he was immersed in a football game on TV. It was a throwaway comment, designed to annoy and it did. It was along the lines of...Chocolate is to women what football is to men... The idea stuck, and Harris began thinking that people have these conflicting feelings about chocolate, and that a lot of people who have very little else in common relate to chocolate in more or less the same kind of way. It became a kind of challenge to see exactly how much of a story I could get which was uniquely centred around chocolate. Other Books
Five Quarters of the OrangeBlackberry Wine
Sleep, Pale SisterThe Evil Seed
Suggested Reading John Allemang The Importance of Lunch
Peter Mayle A Year in Provence; Encore ProvencePatrick Suskind Perfume
Jeannette Winterson Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
Details
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Title
Chocolat
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Author
Hopkins Harris; Joanne Harris
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Binding
Paperback
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Edition
Movie Tie-In
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Pages
320
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Volumes
1
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Language
ENG
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Publisher
Doubleday Canada, Toronto, ON, Canada
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Date
November 14, 2000
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ISBN
9780385658119 / 0385658117
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Weight
0.51 lbs (0.23 kg)
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Dimensions
7.84 x 6.38 x 0.61 in (19.91 x 16.21 x 1.55 cm)
Excerpt
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 with batons spinning and sparkling. But at six the world retains a special luster. A wooden cart, hastily decorated with gilt and crêpe and scenes from fairy tales. A dragon's head on a shield, Rapunzel in a woolen wig, a mermaid with a cellophane tail, a gingerbread house all icing and gilded cardboard, a witch in the doorway, waggling extravagant green fingernails at a group of silent children. ... At six it is possible to perceive subtleties that a year later are already out of reach. Behind the papier-mâché, the icing, the plastic, she can still see the real witch, the real magic. She looks up at me, her eyes, which are the blue-green of Earth seen from a great height, shining.
From the Hardcover edition.
Media reviews
Rich with metaphor and gorgeous writing...sit back and gorge yourself on Chocolat.
“Accomplished and delectable… Few readers will be able to resist.”—New York Times Book Review
“Gourmand Harris’s tale of sin and guilt embodies a fond familiarity with things French that will doubtless prove irresistible to many readers.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“…as sweet, rich and utterly satisfying as a fine truffle. Dieters beware: Ms. Harris’s lush prose drips with mouth-watering descriptions of cocoa confections that could melt even the most resolute of wills.”—Wall Street Journal
“Laden with sensual beauty and an arresting understanding of the human heart, Chocolat is a voluptuous and immensely rewarding read.”—Lethbridge Herald
“Rich with metaphor and gorgeous writing… Sit back and gorge yourself…”—Vancouver Sun
“Is this the best book ever written? This is a truly excellent book… Harris’s achievement is not only in her story, in her insight and humour and the wonderful picture of small-town life in rural France, but also in her writing.”—Literary Review
“Vianne is a magnet for the town's misfits… Vianne gives them chocolate, but also nudges their lives in the right direction… Clearly, chocolate stands for human kindness and consolation. … Jaunty, hopeful and endearing.”—The Guardian (UK)
“You find yourself unable to stop until you’ve finished feasting on this delightful, quirky, sensuous story. This is also a feelgood book of the first order… so full of colour, tastes and scents, that as you are lured by the plot and the wonderful descriptions, your senses are left reeling. This novel is a celebration of pleasure, of love, of tolerance. Read it.”—The Observer
“I slurped down Joanne Harris's new novel with easy enjoyment… As chocoholics stand advised to stock up on some of their favourite bars before biting into Chocolat , so boozers everywhere should get a couple of bottles in before opening Blackberry Wine.”—The Guardian on Blackberry Wine
About the author
"I'm a chocoholic! I admit it! I eat it all the time. Almost on a daily basis...but not quite." Joanne Harris starts the day with drinking chocolate made from milk and proper chocolate. "It's a stimulant. A bit like coffee. But it tastes better to me." She doesn't diet because "I'm not a nice person if I'm doing things like that."
Harris, who is half French, grew up in her grandparents' corner sweetshop in Yorkshire, in the north of England. Her mother had just come over from France and didn't speak English. Joanne grew up speaking French, and still speaks it with her own daughter at home. "Most of the family that I have contact with is French... I've been more or less surrounded by French culture since I was born." She associates chocolate with France, big family reunions and Easter parades. "A lot of members of my family ended up creeping into this story." She lives with her husband, small daughter and several cats in the small Yorkshire mining community of Barnsley where she grew up. Harris feels that small communities the world over have much in common, and Barnsley sometimes felt like Lansquenet in its suspicion of the outsider -- "because we were a French family, because my mother moved to England without knowing any English and because we were always "those funny people at end o' t'road.".."
How did she feel about her book being transformed into a big Hollywood movie? Various changes had to be made, including the fact that the priest figure becomes the mayor in the film. "I understand that when a book gets optioned you basically abnegate all responsibility for it." When the book was optioned, most of her attention was taken up with her next book, which she'd already started writing. In the end, she was extremely happy with the film. "I thought that the changes were quite minor and were really in the spirit of making it a better film." She even contributed a few changes of her own, mainly to do with the character of Vianne. Is there any of Joanne Harris in Vianne Rocher? "Not as much as I would like... I think she is what I would have loved to have been but I am not in any way as confident as she is or indeed as popular. I think there is quite a lot of the priest in me as well." Like Vianne, though, Harris has a fascination with folklore and alternative beliefs. "I do tend to perform little good-luck rituals... I still cast the runes when I feel like it, and I enjoy making my own incense and growing and using herbs. I like to observe the traditional celebrations at Yule and at other significant times of the year."
Some readers have seen in "Chocolat "a comment on the Catholic church. Harris doesn't feel that way herself. "I never felt that this was to do with religious and secular -- it is a story about personalities... It is about tolerance and intolerance." The book is also about liberation and indulgence in the pleasures of life, and has struck a chord when many people, sick of the struggle to stay slim, and are feeling that a little indulgence can be good for the soul. Another British author Helen Fielding, whose "Bridget Jones' Diary" has also been adapted for the screen, created a popular character who grappled with diet over desire, and Canadian food writer John Allemang, in "The Importance of Lunch," has written winningly on the simple pleasures of food. If "Chocolat "reminds us of anything, though, it's gorgeous, sensuous and romantic films such as "Babette's Feast "and "Big Night" with their celebration of food and life; similarly the Japanese film "Tampopo," with its focus on a noodle shop, and the recent acclaimed Chinese film "Shower," where a small community revolves around an old-fashioned bath-house. Small wonder "Chocolat" has been a massive international success.
Harris published two earlier books, both darker in tone -- "I was aiming for a kind of literary horror/gothic genre" -- and not nearly as widely read. Recently, her work is much more optimistic and fun, though she still tends to write darker stories when the weather is bad, and happy stories when the sun shines ("I wrote "Chocolat "from March to July, and it shows"). Since "Chocolat," she has published two more books with mouth-watering themes: "Blackberry Wine," narrated by a bottle of vintage wine, and "The Five Quarters of an Orange," which contains recipes for crepes. "I come from a family where there is a long tradition of cooking and recipes are handed down from various parts of the family -- usually down the French side." As the film of "Chocolat" was being released, she was at work on a screenplay for "Coastliners," to be published as a novel in 2003, about two communities of villagers on a French island, fighting for a beach. Harris reads widely in English and French, citing Nabokov and Mervyn Peake as major inspirational influences for their love of language. She taught French at Leeds Grammar School for many years and had been writing in her spare time when she hit the big time with "Chocolat" in 1999. Although she sometimes misses her former existence as a teacher, she is very happy to be able to make a living out of writing. "Giving up teaching was a very difficult decision for me to take; it was a job I enjoyed, and that I was good at, and I was very much aware that I was giving it up for something much riskier and, in some ways, something quite alien to my nature. However, some rainbows you have to chase." If writing for a living stopped giving her pleasure, she would go back to teaching "without a qualm." But she'd keep on writing.
"I know I'd write whether I was being published or not. I'm addicted."
