The Incantation of Frida K. [Hardcover]

Kate Braverman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 5, 2002

"I was born in rain and I will die in rain," begins Kate Braverman’s The Incantation of Frida K., an imagined life journey of Frida Kahlo. The book opens and closes inside the mind of Frida K., at 46, on her deathbed, taking us through a kaleidoscope of memories and hallucinations where we shiver for two hundred pages on the threshold of life and death, dream and reality, truth and myth. Defiant and uncompromising, Frida bears the wounds of her body and spirit with a stark pride, transcending all limitations, wrapping her senses around the places, events, and conversations in her past. Frida K. interacts from her hospital bed with her mother, sister, Diego, and her nurse. She calls herself a "water woman," navigating into unexplored dimensions of her world, leading us through the alleys of San Francisco’s Chinatown, of Paris in 1939 (where she rubbed shoulders with André Breton), and of her neighborhood in Mexico City, Coyoacan. Her voyage is an inward one, an incantation before dying. In The Incantation of Frida K., Braverman’s language dances and spins. She carves out a bold interpretation of the life of an artist to whom she is vitally connected.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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.

From Library Journal

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.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Seven Stories Press; 1st edition (March 5, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1583224696
• ISBN-13: 978-1583224694
• Product Dimensions: 5.8 x 0.9 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,741,916 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beauty vs Biography, April 8, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: The Incantation of Frida K. (Hardcover)

Kate Braverman has once again enveloped us with her magical and incantatory prose poetry. This book uses the last day of Frida's life to explode and explore human conciousness and continue Braverman's fight for equality for women artists. This book has about as much to do with the real life of Frida K. as Blood Meridian has to do with the real life of Buffalo Bill. This is a book of distilled essence and a meditation by one great female artist on another. If you are looking for a biography, look elsewhere. If you are looking for a feast of the mind, a wild hallucinatory ride, and some of the finest poetic prose since Plath then this is your book. 'Bravermaniacs' don't have to be told what awaits them. For the rest of us, perhaps it is time to take a break from the linear novel and return to the use of fiction to explore the inner world that films simply can't deliver. I found the Incantation of Frida K. to be both beautiful and horrifying, an unforgetable experience and a book not to be missed by serious readers.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Incantations of Frida K., May 17, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: The Incantation of Frida K. (Hardcover)

This book has powers. If you are drawn to exquisite poetic imagery this book will reward you not only with the beauty and originality of it's language but with the success with which it invokes the drama, passion, pain and perception of its subject, Frida Kahlo.

Frida's story, in Kate Braverman's words, is a story of a human being who is fated to endure a life of severe and chronic physical and psychological damage, who is blessed and cursed with an extremely acute sensibility and the talent and drive to express it to the eyes and nerves of the world through her canvasses. Her work has been classified as Surrealist. She refused this label. She stated she was painting reality as she knew it. Morphine, Opium and Demoral were part of that reality and were what it took to keep physical pain down and her perceptions and her artistic production up. Medical and surgical treatments have come along way in the last 50 years.

The book also explores Frida's relationship with Diego Riviera, who was the centerpiece of her painful fate. He physically and psychologically abused her, humiliated her and used her originality and style to pioneer the corporate branding concept in marketing, while at the same time denigrating her vastly superior talent.(Who's the footnote now, Diego?}.

Kate Braverman has given us a Frida who can be seen , felt, admired, applauded and loved within and beyond the context of her paintings. Read the paintings, see the book.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Braverman =Intelligence, May 14, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: The Incantation of Frida K. (Hardcover)

This novel combines all the beauty of a poem, and all the acumen of one artist to another. Braverman's fictional rendering of Kahlo finally gives a materiality of the artist rather than the myth. For this alone, Braverman is singular in her audacity and vision.