Nice bit of fanciful storytelling, bit too ‘woo woo’ for me, but hey, it’s coming up to Christmas and this will be a really good present for one of your friends. I asked my local bookseller for a recommendation for something easy and fun, but not rubbish. Not every book needs to be a lit masterpiece but every book must be well written for its audience and have a point, must delight in some way. Vianne, prequel to the splendid Chocolat, is full of entertaining and wistful romps around Marseilles, which was enough to keep me happily engaged. Read it in the hammock if your Christmas is southern hemisphere, or curled up by the fire through the dark afternoons up north.
The second story of the pair, Chocolat, was written first, back in 2000. It has Vianne Rocher and her child Anouk, footloose and without friends or family, blowing into a small French town and charming up a community of friends. It was made into a good movie. Vianne goes back to give the story of her beginnings. It opens with Vianne’s mother taking the child on the run from some danger, some shadow of a man. They change names and towns and live hand to mouth, picking up odd jobs. When Vianne is a teen her mother dies in New York and the girl spends the last of her money on a ticket to Marseilles where she knows no one. She’s pregnant. Here’s a kid with no money, no support, just lots of street smarts, but over and over again, luck falls her way – she immediately gets a job in a cafe that has a live-in position, she has never cooked more than noodles before but finds the cookery book of the owner’s late wife and manages within a day or two, to turn out her recipes for the customers and run the kitchen single handed.
She’s a bit of a little urchin know-it-all, understanding people better than they know themselves, discerning their secrets, giving them what she thinks they need. ‘Fixing’ people, from adding a magic ingredient in their hot chocolate to cure melancholy to finding an estranged child. The locals bristle. I’ll bet they do. But she does know best.
She also has an uncanny thing with smells, can remember scents and tastes and when she meets a couple of guys opening a chocolate shop she can discern in a box, “the dusty scent of cacao beans hoarded in cedarwood caskets; the spicy scent of cacao liqueur whisked to a froth in an abalone cup; the hot scent of chillies, and cumin, and mace; the sweet and rich vanilla scent of innocence and childhood. Chocolate is like wine, I think.” It’s a lovely thought, but hasn’t she been homeless and on the run all her short life?
I can take a leap of faith with all this, enjoy the magic spells and witches and the way Vianne can recognise the inner soul of everyone she meets. The descriptions of Marseilles are evocative. The writing flows and the story is carried along with the community she collects around her. It’s very much one of those ‘found family’ stories and Vianne is the catalyst who brings everyone together in the end. But the shadow of the man from her mother’s stories approaches and she is her mother’s daughter, a free spirit. She is nearing the time for her daughter to be born and she has a chocolate shop of her own in her future. Off she goes to Chocolat.
Cristina Sanders' blog 