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The Incantation of Frida K.

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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.

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.

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.

The Incantation of Frida K. by Kate Braverman

Here is yet another telling of the fascinating life of Frida Kahol, done in an unusual way by author Kate Braverman. The story is told by Frida while she is in a drug-induced state as she lays on her deathbed. Because of her state of mind, the book seems to read like a hallucinatory dream, with spurts of reality mixed in.

Frida tells her life story in bits and pieces, from the first day she meets her future lover and husband, artist and communist Diego Rivera, to her own exploits as a celebrated artist and fellow communist, and the accident that left her a cripple all her adult life. Since her memories are being told while in a drug-induced state, it is difficult to determine what is fiction and what is fact.

I found this a highly unusual book and rank it among my top 20 books of 2002. It is definitely not the book to read for one that wants to know more about Frida, but it is more of a work of art. Kate Bravermen takes the reader into the mind of an eccentric artist, and it is a fascinating journey.

The Incantation Of Frida K. by Kate Braverman is a work of sophisticated fiction that brings the reader along on an imaginary tour of the late Mexican artist Frida Kahlo's life. A profound and vivid testimony of the years hard living and equally hard playing, as well as an inward journey at the moment of death, The Incantation Of Frida K. is an absorbing and engagingly imaginative read.

This is a beautiful poetic book, and its surrealism is appropriate to a surrealist painter. In the novel Frida Kahlo denies that she's a surrealist, but surrealism is about providing greater insights into reality than surface realism can. I see that in Kahlo's work and in this novel. I don't advise reading this book if you know nothing about Frida Kahlo. It's completely non-linear and isn't meant to be a biography. This book's truth is the truth of myth poured onto the page in artful language.

As she has done with her settings--usually Los Angeles--and her characters, Kate Braverman rescues Frida Kahlo from the dumbing down process of popular culture with an once-in-a-lifetime act of fiction. "The Incantation of Frida K.," despite some of its breathtaking accuracies, is not biography, but an attempt to re-create the mind, if not the creative process, of a woman whom we can only dream to know; the raw of her, as presented by Braverman, defies the easy categorization which so often obscures legends. Sticklers for "the truth" may complain about the novel's characterization of Diego Rivera, or perhaps any other historical character, but that is not the point of an act of fiction, such as this. This novel aims to show the ignition, acceleration, and ultimate crash of a feverish imagination that was quite possibly too big for her time, if not even today's earth. Indeed, I could have read this book in a single evening if I did not have the world--and my two-year-old--to worry about.
I would say more, but it's difficult to review a book that takes your breath away; it would probably be best just to let this incredible prose speak for itself. Writing like this--radiant yet ethereal, and still sharp and insightful--is too rarely published these days. "The Incantation of Frida K." offers a rare opportunity--take it, before all the bottom line publishers take it away from us.

Braverman creates a fantastic, hallucinogenic landscape to represent Kahlo's vision as she creates her voice giving details of her life through her death bed first person narrative. The book explores the ideas behind what is truth when subjective perception filters the world differently for each individual, and Braverman succeeds well in representing Kahlo's point of view.

The book falls very short though in accurately representing Kahlo's life as it was. Biographical details are ignored and one begins to wonder what exactly Braverman's mission is. Kahlo's dedication to communism is twisted to have her describing key communist leaders like Trotsky as bourgeois hypocrites. Her relationship with Diego Rivera which Kahlo herself writes in her diaries as one of mutual inspiration and love is often represented as an oppressive hell. Feminist stereotypes are pushed on to the narrative as Kahlo is represented as being a water woman, Diego becomes a ... oppressor, and time is spent on random lesbian affairs and the nearly "hemaphroditic" nature and strength of Frida. Kahlo is rich material for a unique story, but it seems that Braverman often resorts to oft used tropes to tell her story and describe her life.

Fictionalized accounts of real people that adopt their voice are a troubled undertaking for artists and while the poetic language and imagery of the novel is often lush and inciteful about Kahlo largely the work seems inaccurate and often incomplete in its ideas about the woman herself.

The Incantation of Frida K: The first parargaph was irresistable and left me curious. Her story is like no other, its compelling and mysterious. Told by Frida herself, she goes through many various stages in her life. While becomming addicted to morphine and cigarettes you really get to know her pain and thoughts.

I've read other works fictionalizing Frida Kahlo and I differ greatly from the opinions of the others who claim this was a great read. I felt it was too left field and poorly imagined.