The Incantation of Frida K. [Anglais] [Relié]

Poet, short story writer and novelist Braverman (Lithium for Medea) delivers a wildly energetic, nearly hallucinatory account of Frida Kahlo, Mexican painter and wife of Diego Rivera. Frida is 46 and on her deathbed, addicted to morphine, Demerol, cigarettes and alcohol, and missing one leg from an amputation. Her memory is acute, though her chronology is foggy; in ecstatic prose she recounts the salient events of her adult life. At the age of 17, she suffers a horrific trolley accident and is impaled by a metal pole, which leaves her sterile, mutilated and more or less a pariah. Diego Rivera, the famous painter of monumental public works, notices her when she brings him lunches on his scaffolding; they marry and he transforms her into an international Marxist statement, parading her around the world in childlike peasant costumes. They are a wealthy, notorious "vaudeville team": Diego, ambitious and chronically unfaithful, belittles Frida's own paintings as "less than postcards," while foulmouthed Frida, raw from pain and addiction, scorns him as having the "heart of a butcher." Braverman keeps her jagged narrative from self-destructing by adhering to specific themes: Frida's desire for a daughter, as well as her personal and professional excoriation. Braverman's portrait of the "vanished woman" including her cartoonish recreation of encounters Frida allegedly has with Trotsky and his wife may put some readers off, but her work is commendably bold and strenuously imaginative, as befits her iconic subject.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Braverman's literary genius shines here as she takes on the voice of Frida Kahlo, which emerges with the luminous and haunting tone one would imagine the late Mexican artist would have. Gleaning inspiration from Kahlo's paintings, as well as her afflicted romance with Diego Rivera, Braverman (Lithium for Medea) clearly understands the tortured existence of the artist. She evokes the physical and emotional strain that Kahlo struggled with since an accident at age 17 and that ultimately defined who she became as a human and an artist. Her life is told through short, poetic sentences, creating an erratic tone, which, although unnerving, lends credibility to the prose. It is clear that Braverman has done her homework, no doubt studying Kahlo's letters and diaries, which have been published in the past ten years. Indeed, lines such as "I've transcended canvas....I'm working in a region of absence" seem to spill directly from Kahlo herself, showing that Braverman's talent lies not only with language but with imagination. Although this is a tumultuous and disturbing story, it is a refreshing reminder that Kahlo is emerging as an important and recognizable figure in the Surrealist movement apart from her husband. Throughout, Braverman achieves for Kahlo what Kahlo could never fully achieve for herself: recognition as an artist in her own right and not just Rivera's pretty Mexican wife. Rachel Collins, "Library Journal"
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Painter Frida Kahlo's mythic and unnerving self-portraits led to her beatification as a martyr to pain, art, and sexism. Already the subject of a novel by Barbara Mujica (frida, 2001), she has now inspired Braverman, a piercingly lyric and psychologically acute writer as bold in her excavation of the dark side of womanhood as Kahlo herself. The author of such entrancing works as Small Craft Warnings (1998), Braverman inhabits Kahlo's ravaged body and drug-drenched mind as the 46-year-old warrior-painter lies on her deathbed, finally succumbing to the horrendous injuries she sustained as a teenager in a surreal bus-trolley accident. By turns tormented and cajoled by her egocentric husband, muralist Diego Rivera, Kahlo turns inward, replaying troubling scenes real and imagined from her tragic life. So deeply immersed is Braverman in Kahlo's electrifying paintings, she has absorbed their colors, imagery, and spirit, and translates them into an anguished yet sublime fever dream in which the sorrows of the caustic, gifted, and omnivorous Kahlo --adorned with flowers, long skirts, corsets supporting her shattered spine, and a perpetually burning cigarette--become the sufferings of every wounded woman. Donna Seaman
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Braverman’s imagined life of Frida Kahlo begins and ends within the mind of the painter, at 46, on her deathbed. Reflecting on people, places, and events in her past, Frida is defiant, bearing the wounds of her body and spirit with a stark pride. Through memory and hallucination, Frida talks of men, art, and philosophy. Though she loves Diego Rivera, she openly scorns his limited vision and his “vulgar and inconsequential murals.” In her bold, surprising, and vivid award-winning style, Braverman plumbs the psyche of an uncompromising woman and artist. “Ms. Braverman possesses a magical, incantatory voice.” — The New York Times