The long awaited diary that survived the fire…
This month I’m focusing on those rustic tales of life from a time past in the 19th century. Kicking it off is Laura Esquivel’s thirty year in the making indie novel Tita’s Diary.
Every once in a while, a rustic novel comes into form that gives you that motherfucking life you didn’t know you needed. It’s like a breath of fresh air in a sea of stale books. Well, that book for was Like Water For Chocolate. It was one of the first books I ever read in a language other than English. So if you read that novel you are already hip to the life of the De La Garza family, starting in the late 19th century and concluding in the middle 20th century. Tita’s Diary akak El Diario De Tita is that Like Water For Chocolate companion, not sequel, that gives you a nice slice of Tita’s Xmas Rolls and a Fritter with the glaze.
Now let’s get one thing straight. Yes, Like Water For Chocolate was a PenguinRandomSchuster release 30 years ago. However, Laura Esquivel is very much an indie author these days and is no longer considered of value to commercial imprinting, so her latest releases in the De La Garza saga and other have been published via the abysmal, terrible, fucked up ass KDP/Amazon distribution which is almost heartbreaking and a shame since there are better options but independent and ebook exclusive all the same. Having said that, Ms. Laura needs her flowers for being an OG in the game for over thirty years and still dropping gem books.
Other thing – the book cover and the overall format is shit on a shingle. I wouldn’t have went with it but it sort of gives us the concept of being the burned journal down. When you open it, ebook or print book alike, it looks like a journal from the 19th century, including having the book written in cursive, which is hard as hell to read. I get the journal idea and its cute, but not for a novel. There isn’t enough contrast between the color of the words and the color of the pages to make it easy to read without eye strain and a fucking headache, which is definitely a bitch if you’re reading it in Spanish like I did. Indie book or no indie book, that is bad business. Amazon release or no Amazon release as a novel we need a Garamond font. As a collectable attached to a regular sized/formatted book I wouldn’t have minded, so keep that in mind if you’re willing to tackle this.
Now let’s get down to the nitty gritty with Tita’s Diary.
The novel gives us a very intimate and personal side of Tita De La Garza’s struggles in her family that we read about in Like Water For Chocolate from her journal entries in her recipe book. The concept here is that the novel is the very extensive diary Tita kept (hence the name) that her niece Esparanza found after the farm burned down at the end of Like Water For Chocolate when she was on her honeymoon and didn’t find out about until she after she returned with her new husband, who just happened to be Dr. John’s son.
Now if you didn’t read Like Water For Chocolate that’s okay, because you find out the same story that novel gave us through this, just from a up close and personal perspective of Tita. The crux of both novels is that Elena De La Garza had three girls – Rosaura, Gertrudis, and Tita, and Tita, the baby girl, was forbidden from ever marrying being the last girl. Mama Elena’s family had a fucked up tradition that the last girl would be a slave to the mother, which happened to Tita after the sudden heart attack of her father after her birth (and that was due to his bitch ass friends talking shit at the celebration of Tita’s birth that Mama Elena tipped out on him with a Black dude and Gertrudis is the daughter of a Mulatto who was then killed from a racial attack as a result of their affair).
Tita’s drop dead gorgeous and has no issues attracting males, even as a girl. Pedro, the dude next door, has loved her since they were kids. When they become young adults, he makes his move and asks for her hand in marriage, which Mama Elena not only denies, but marries him off to her older spinster daughter Rosaura. That just spins off sneaking, creeping, wrongful couplings, misunderstanding, and a roller coaster of fucked up shit that spawns even more fucked up shit until the fucked up shit finally comes to an harrowing ending.
Now just because you read Like Water For Chocolate doesn’t mean you’ve read Tita’s Diary. Her diary gives us Tita’s uncensored perspective on things, specifically the emotional toll of her sister marrying, fucking, and having kids with her man, Mama Elena’s cruelty, especially in death, Chencha’s unrequited thotness, Gertrudis being “different” aka showing Negroesque traits until she gets definitive proof that she is in fact a mulatto, Pedro’s struggles before during and after his marriage, John and her confliction of loving him but not being in love with him, and of course the patron saint of all good mother figures Nacha, who helps Tita in life and death.
If you’re a fan of Like Water For Chocolate, get the book, struggle through its hard ass design choices, and get that life. For those who haven’t read Like Water For Chocolate, you will definitely hate it with a passion because of reading it in the hard handwriting. I feel like Ms. Laura put this out for the fans to give them something to chew on until the release of The Colors Of My Past, which is the third book of De La Garza and the loose sequel that follows Rosaura’s brood as they reconnect with Tita and the rest of their crazy ass family. And ain’t nothing wrong with that. I want to see her sell a lot of these like she did in the OG book days.
Give it a shot.
