Concealed within Bittersweet Journey's provocative and orginal chocolate-box design is an exquisitely written novel - romantic, nostalgic, delicately humorous - sprinkled with the author's own luscious photographs and her aphrodisiac passion for chocolate. Charlotte leaves her husband in a quest for more - love, sex, chocolate - lured by her craving from Greenwich Village to the chocolate capitals of the world. Perhaps most enticing of all, the inclusion of evocative color photographs of the world's best chocolates, the addresses of the chocolatiers who make them, and several quintessential recipes for chocolate desserts, allows readers to make Charlotte's journey their own.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Review
"A beautiful book: tender, passionate, thoroughly wonderful. Buy it, rent it, steal it, or devour it cover to cover standing in the bookstore, but read it." -- Jason, HHHH Associates [website]
"A woman leaves her husband to immerse herself in the world of chocolate. Makes sense to us." -- The Swoon Bookstore:Hot Fiction, [website]
"Chocolate Book of the Month: Lush and sensual. Gorgeous photography." -- Stephanie Zonis,The Global Gourmet [website], December 1998
"Enid Futterman's unique amalgamation of sensuality and chocolate is blended into a visually stunning book that is part novel, part photography book, part erotica, part travel essay, and part cookbook." -- Jami Edwards, The Book Report@aol.com
"From its gold endpapers to its lush photography to its sensuous story of a woman seeking love and chocolate, Bittersweet Journey explores the inextricable link between women's longing for men and the deep need for cacao. A novel for the senses and the imagination." -- Mauny Kaseberg, mauny's kitchen table[website], Book of the Week/1/24-2/6/99
"These first-time-at-bat published authors have hit home runs with their new novels...Bittersweet Journey is an original, delicious journey of self-discovery for Charlotte, who leaves her husband in search of more love and chocolate. Filled with sensuous photographs and tantalizing recipes, this book is a delight for all the senses." -- Donna Zmrazek
"This enchanting story is accompanied by beautiful and seductive photographs of chocolate." -- Carole Bloom, All About Chocolate ([Macmillan 1998]
"This is so intensely a woman's odyssey that I have been almost shy in giving it to male friends, as though I am somehow telling secrets. It is an exquisite book to handle, like a wrapped box of chocolates. The photographs are evocative, lush and draw you in-not just to her journey, but into her psyche. While she drifts hopefully through Europe, she explores all the levels of human longing, until the longing becomes an end in itself. This book does have a few recipes, all of which I have used and all of which are staggeringly rich and good. But it is most of all a book to be read and savoured and returned to like a fairy tale." -- Elaine DiRico, 3/24/99
"With the compression of poetry and the candor of memoir, Futterman pens a modern fable in Bittersweet Journey, infusing her archetypal hungry woman with yearnings at once specific and resonant, uncloseting the secret of eating that is every girl-child's inner wagging finger. The passion is chocolate because it's dark, narcotizing, melting, and sticky." -- Laurie Stone, Village Voice, February 25, 1998
Enid Futterman's fiction is a bonbon--a knowing exploration of the way her character Charlotte's longing for lust and for chocolate intermingle. Elliptical as poetry, Joseph Campbell would recognize in Charlotte's story the quest of the mythic hero, a journey that begins underground and concludes in the light of heightened understanding. Futterman has her underpinning in place, but not visible. And the very medium of Charlotte's search is so sticky and opaque that one is left with more of a sense of memory than a sense of having read an initiation story with psychological overtones. -- Betsy Willeford, Newark Star-Ledger, 02/08/98
"A woman leaves her husband to immerse herself in the world of chocolate. Makes sense to us." -- The Swoon Bookstore:Hot Fiction, [website]
"Chocolate Book of the Month: Lush and sensual. Gorgeous photography." -- Stephanie Zonis,The Global Gourmet [website], December 1998
"Enid Futterman's unique amalgamation of sensuality and chocolate is blended into a visually stunning book that is part novel, part photography book, part erotica, part travel essay, and part cookbook." -- Jami Edwards, The Book Report@aol.com
"From its gold endpapers to its lush photography to its sensuous story of a woman seeking love and chocolate, Bittersweet Journey explores the inextricable link between women's longing for men and the deep need for cacao. A novel for the senses and the imagination." -- Mauny Kaseberg, mauny's kitchen table[website], Book of the Week/1/24-2/6/99
"These first-time-at-bat published authors have hit home runs with their new novels...Bittersweet Journey is an original, delicious journey of self-discovery for Charlotte, who leaves her husband in search of more love and chocolate. Filled with sensuous photographs and tantalizing recipes, this book is a delight for all the senses." -- Donna Zmrazek
"This enchanting story is accompanied by beautiful and seductive photographs of chocolate." -- Carole Bloom, All About Chocolate ([Macmillan 1998]
"This is so intensely a woman's odyssey that I have been almost shy in giving it to male friends, as though I am somehow telling secrets. It is an exquisite book to handle, like a wrapped box of chocolates. The photographs are evocative, lush and draw you in-not just to her journey, but into her psyche. While she drifts hopefully through Europe, she explores all the levels of human longing, until the longing becomes an end in itself. This book does have a few recipes, all of which I have used and all of which are staggeringly rich and good. But it is most of all a book to be read and savoured and returned to like a fairy tale." -- Elaine DiRico, 3/24/99
"With the compression of poetry and the candor of memoir, Futterman pens a modern fable in Bittersweet Journey, infusing her archetypal hungry woman with yearnings at once specific and resonant, uncloseting the secret of eating that is every girl-child's inner wagging finger. The passion is chocolate because it's dark, narcotizing, melting, and sticky." -- Laurie Stone, Village Voice, February 25, 1998
Enid Futterman's fiction is a bonbon--a knowing exploration of the way her character Charlotte's longing for lust and for chocolate intermingle. Elliptical as poetry, Joseph Campbell would recognize in Charlotte's story the quest of the mythic hero, a journey that begins underground and concludes in the light of heightened understanding. Futterman has her underpinning in place, but not visible. And the very medium of Charlotte's search is so sticky and opaque that one is left with more of a sense of memory than a sense of having read an initiation story with psychological overtones. -- Betsy Willeford, Newark Star-Ledger, 02/08/98
From the Back Cover
"In Bittersweet Journey, Enid Futterman confirms in touching prose that chocolate is the food of love." --Christopher Idone, Cookbook Author.
"Bittersweet Journey is destined to be the chocolate lover's sweetest dream." --Marcel Desaulniers, Author of Death by Chocolate
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A delight for all the senses.,
By LBW76 "Reader" (Wilton, Connecticut) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Bittersweet Journey: A Modestly Erotic Novel of Love, Longing, and Chocolate (Hardcover)
The photography, the story, the knowledge of chocolate -- altogether Enid Futterman's Bittersweet Journey is a delight for all the senses. Perhaps the first of its kind, it is a visual novel, and it is just beautiful. In this deliciously rich and psychologically profound piece of work, the photography is every bit as evocative as the narrative.It is the story of a woman sprung loose from her marriage who begins an obsessive journey to find the right man via the great capitals of chocolate. Sampling love the way she samples truffles, Charlotte scours Vienna, Munich, Zurich, Brussels, London, Paris, Hawaii, New York and New Hapshire (where the most delicious real ganache is housed in the unlikely bodies of chocolate mice) finding bad boys and beautiful chocolates to arouse her. But most significantly, Bittersweet Journey is the story of journey into the interior of a woman, a dark tour of the female psyche where longing and love are indistinguishable. Enid Futterman writes in a sharp, spare, deeply poetic way that is reminiscent of Jean Rhys and Marguerite Duras, and comes up with something that will resonate in the heart, mind and palate for a long time to come.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An excellent and very unique book.,
By A Customer
This review is from: Bittersweet Journey: A Modestly Erotic Novel of Love, Longing, and Chocolate (Hardcover)
Like a fine truffle this book seems best consumed in one or two bites ... marvelous bites. The text is the most poetic prose I have read in some time, and the stunning photographs (also by the author) make the various chocolates as delicious, alive and sensuous as the book's heroine, Charlotte. I found the "journey" hauntingly appealing. It is alternately nostalgic, melancholy, exciting, intriguing, fulfilling ... but always permeated by an atmosphere of longing and the "bittersweet."It is also a most unique and sophisticated book. The chocolate stands as both metaphor and solid object in the writing, with recipes for some of its delicacies spelled out in an appendix. The design of the book and its pages is beautiful, unusual and clever: a perfect complement to the text. Yet it is one of the rare cases where the whole seems even greater than some very high-quality parts. A delicious book.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
So much more than "a chocolate lovers romp",
By
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Bittersweet Journey: A Modestly Erotic Novel of Love, Longing, and Chocolate (Hardcover)
Deep questions are looked at and lived .Wisdom gained by walking the razor's edge is on on nearly every page .I know several people who need these questions explored and I'm glad there is this book to recommend. There is more than enough chocolate lore and lust for anyone...and who thought there ever COULD be enough? Fnid Futterman understands . Also having Ms Futterman's own photos illustrate her journey added, on many levels, a wholeness of vision . Chocolate is itself... and a metaphor for much. This book will take you as deep as you want to go and most likely futher than you thought possible It's deep fun.
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