Beauty Is Convulsive: The Passion of Frida Kahlo [Hardcover]

Carole Maso (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 5, 2002

A vibrant series of prose poems celebrating the life of artist Frida Kahlo.

Beauty Is Convulsive is a biographical meditation on one of the twentieth century's most compelling and famous artists, Frida Kahlo (1907-1954). At the age of nineteen, Kahlo's life was transformed when the bus in which she was riding was hit by a trolley car. Pierced by a steel handrail and broken in many places, she entered a long period of convalescence during which she began to paint self-portraits. In 1928, at twenty-one, she joined the Communist Party and came to know Diego Rivera. The forty-one-year-old Rivera, Mexico's most famous painter, was impressed by the force of Kahlo's personality and by the authenticity of her art, and the two soon married. Though they were devoted to each other, intermittent affairs on both sides, Frida's grief over her inability to bear a child, and her frequent illnesses made the marriage tumultuous. This prose poem is typical Maso --vigorous, daring, always original. She brings together parts of Kahlo's biography, her letters, medical documents, and her diaries with language that is often as erotic and colorful as Kahlo's paintings.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This impressionistic book recaps some of the more infamous events of the Mexican artist's life. Maso (The Art Lover; Aureole) relies on Kahlo's diary, as well as on letters, medical reports and Hayden Herrera's biography, Frida, and focuses primarily on the mental and physical torment the painter suffered after being maimed in a trolley accident when she was 19. For years after the accident, Kahlo's doctors prescribed a series of almost medieval corsets and a constant flow of painkillers; she also suffered miscarriages and eventually lost a leg to gangrene. Somewhat fewer pages are devoted to her painting and her relationship with Diego Rivera, although both are duly noted. Maso renders all this in an experimental hybrid of prose and poetry; nonlinearity, repetition, multiple voices and fragmentation dominate, and she shows little regard for punctuation. Some readers will inevitably find this distracting, but it feels appropriate to the jagged world of pain, deformity and drug addiction in which Kahlo spent more than half her life. Fortunately, despite the grim goings-on, Maso, like her subject, is not without a sense of humor (she slyly notes the commercialization and fetishizing of all things Frida and tosses quotes from Kahlo's detractors, as well as her own critics, into the mix), which helps her to capture the "absurdity of the maimed and desperately decorated."
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

In this poetry-like fiction, novelist and essayist Maso (Defiance, etc.) uses images from the life of Frida Kahlo to create, as she describes in her author's note, "a deeply personal meditation: an attempt to be in some kind of dialog with [Kahlo] across time and space-and with myself." This interaction between the author and her subject is the heart of this book, making it an imaginative, internalized interpretation of Kahlo's life and work, even if it is reliant on factual material, including Hayden Herrera's Frida. Maso's fiction is inclined toward the heights of passion and despair, so Kahlo's life, marked as it was by physical anguish and by her sensual and often pain-riddled self-portraits, makes for fitting material. Repetition, songlike cadences, and the occasional first-person narrator will make this book more appealing to readers interested in how prose, poetry, and biography intersect than to those wanting straightforward narration. But interest in Kahlo, spiked by the recent film and perhaps by Kate Braverman's Incantations of Frida K., may draw new readers to this consistently inventive writer. Maso's prose has generated wide respect, making this an important purchase for libraries with literary fiction collections.
Carolyn Kuebler, "Library Journal"
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: Counterpoint; First Edition edition (November 5, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582430896
• ISBN-13: 978-1582430898
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.9 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #528,477 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Dancing with Frida, December 20, 2002

By 

"blissengine" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Beauty Is Convulsive: The Passion of Frida Kahlo (Hardcover)

After having read Kahlo's diary she kept in her final days, Maso became inspired by not only Kahlo's art, but by her vision of the world, and has created in "Beauty Is Convulsive" a marvelous series of prose poems. Incorporating aspects of Kahlo's life into meditations on suffering and pain as art, these poems weave a tapestry of Kahlo's artistic mind, which was deeply affected by her physical ailments that persisted throughout her life. This is not a biography, but rather a side dish for readers enthralled by Kahlo's (or Maso's, for that matter) powerful art. Reaching back to the styles used in her previous book "Aureole", Carole Maso has written a fascinating, complex, and unique book celebrating a passionate artist.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Maso, Kahlo, and a cigarette, December 6, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Beauty Is Convulsive: The Passion of Frida Kahlo (Hardcover)

This work adds to Maso's reputation as one of the most significant writers today. As Maso has suggested in the past, why are less known artists ignored in media, at the expense of well-known writers. Hopefully, this smart, beautifully engaging, and funny text will introduce a new audience to two influential and important artists.

3.0 out of 5 stars Hard to read without previous Kahlo experience, December 4, 2011

By 

kj (Orlando, Florida, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Beauty Is Convulsive: The Passion of Frida Kahlo (Hardcover)

I must admit I'm not very familiar with Frida Kahlo's work, have never read anything about her, and am only vaguely aware of who she was and what she represented. With that background - or lack of one - I found this poetry difficult to follow. I'm sure it would mean more to someone who is already a fan.