Shirley Kossick
THE LAW OF LOVE by Laura Esquivel(Chatto and Windus, R89,95)
HERE’S the solution to your Christmas shopping dilemma if you’ve been hesitating between books and CDs. The Law of Love is a multi-media novel (the first, the publishers claim) which comes complete with a CD of Puccini arias and Mexican danzones, as well as six sections of narrative illustrations.
The idea is that the reader should pause at certain marked points in the text and listen to a designated track which – together with the “graphic novel” segments – should transport one into the characters’ past lives. This doesn’t quite work, however, as (besides the inconvenience should a CD player not happen to be handy when one is reading) music tends to have its own associations for each listener which are not always overlaid by the ruminations of Esquivel’s characters. So, while the music is pleasant enough, it serves as more of an interruption to the novel than as a complement to it.
Much the same can be said about the graphic segments which punctuate the text at crucial moments. Instead of enriching the reader’s response to remembered incidents, the drawings are so weak they impoverish and limit the imagination.
Though the artist, Miguelanxo Prado, is described in the blurb as “Spain’s premier graphic-novel artist”, the illustrations are flat and totally lacking in the vitality of Esquivel’s prose. The lifelessness of the graphics is especially conspicuous when compared to the evocative jacket illustration by Montserrat Pecanins, which achieves a Chagall-like yet distinctly Latin quality.
This illustration cleverly encapsulates the novel’s dual setting of Tenochtitlan, destroyed in 1521 by the Spanish, and Mexico City. which was constructed on its ruins. The central characters move between the 16th and 23rd centuries, changing their appearances, names and even sexes as they experience 14 000 incarnations. We are not presented with each of these, though sometimes it feels as if we are!
Briefly – if one can be brief about Esquivel’s somewhat frenetic plotting – the story concerns the heroine Azucena’s search for her twin soul. It turns out that events at the time of the conquest of Mexico have set in motion a cycle of retaliation and revenge.
Fourteen thousand lives later, Esquivel catapults us into the future, where Azucena, an astro-analyst, uses music to enable her patients to re-examine past incarnations. With this shift into science fiction mode we encounter photomental cameras, aerophone and virtual reality sets, but the three protagonists remain locked in their centuries-old conflict.
Azucena’s twin soul is still “karmically challenged”, while someone else is fraudulently masquerading as the reincarnation of Mother Teresa and planning to become president of the planet. With all this and much else going on in the novel, one wonders why Esquivel thought she needed other media to help her story along.
More ambitious than her 1990 novel, Like Water for Chocolate, but – probably as a result – not nearly as satisfactory, The Law of Love nevertheless has a certain romantic gusto which saves it from pretentiousness. So, too, Esquivel’s capacity for self-parody redeems her long excursions into New Age philosophy and gives a witty post-modernist edge to this rather chaotic experiment in mixed genres.