Laura Esquivel on "Like Water for Chocolate," destiny and the thoughts of inanimate objects By JOAN SMITH high romance, spiced with a few traditional Mexican recipes, was the ingredient that made Laura Esquivel's first novel, "Like Water for Chocolate," an international phenomenon when it was simultaneously released as both a book and a movie in the U.S. in 1993. Her second novel might well be destined for a similar popularity. Part New Age bodice ripper, part picture-book for adults, "The Law of Love," is a plot-driven novel designed to allow the reader short breaks between chapters to look at illustrations by Miguelanxo Prado and listen to Mexican love songs and popular opera arias, all incorporated by Esquivel into the plot. The music is provided on a CD tucked into the back of the book. If the package sounds gimmicky, it is, and serious readers are likely to find the novel, with its comic-book characters and musical interludes, more irritating than engaging. But Esquivel is both a former schoolteacher and a screenwriter, and her mission is to teach and to entertain. This novel, like its predecessor, was clearly intended for the movies. Robert Redford has already expressed an interest in filming the story, with its inventive plot and wonderful visual possibilities. And if "The Law of Love" is not much in the way of a literary work, it has a definite appeal rooted in Esquivel's gift for inventing new ways of telling the story of thwarted romantic love, and in her deep and earnest belief in certain dicta of the New Age. Esquivel's heroine is Azucena, a psychotherapist living in 23rd-century Mexico City where high technology has virtually eliminated crime and research has acquired new meaning thanks to equipment that can decode the secrets of everything, from human auras to the memories of the stones that have borne witness to human history. Azucena, who uses music to help her patients remember their past lives, is trying to recover her own memories in a search for her Twin Soul, her true love, Rodrigo. There are Guardian Angels, both good and evil, and there is a politician who claims to have been Mother Teresa in a past life and who needs to eliminate everyone with a memory that could prove otherwise. Esquivel's strength is her sincere belief in The Law of Love, or perhaps more precisely, the rule of love. After the remarkable success of "Like Water for Chocolate" -- which, according to Entertainment Weekly, was one of the highest-grossing foreign films of all time -- her 12-year marriage and professional collaboration with Mexican director Alfonso Arau fell apart and she sued him in New York's State Supreme Court for allegedly reneging on a promise to pay her 5 percent of the film's net profits. She has since met and married a man she calls her own Twin Soul, a dentist named Javier Valdez. They live together in Mexico City, where she is finishing a children's book and beginning another novel. Esquivel spoke with Salon through her literary agent, Thomas Colchie, who elegantly translated my questions into Spanish and her responses into English over the phone. Next: Breaking the rules.