Tinisima [Paperback]

Elena Poniatowska (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1, 1998

This moving novel tells the tumultuous story of Tina Modotti, an Italian refugee to the United States who initially gained attention as a Hollywood actress. Brilliant, beautiful, fiery, and promiscuous, Modotti modeled for and lived with photographer Edward Weston in Mexico in the 1920s. An accomplished photographer herself, she became a militant member of the Mexican Communist Party. When Modotti was accused of the murder of her Cuban lover, the Mexican press had a field day, publishing nude photographs of her along with sensational stories about her various love affairs. Eventually she fled to the U.S.S.R. and then to Europe, where she became a secret agent and a nurse under an assumed name, returning to Mexico to meet an early death at the age of forty-five. Capturing with great sensitivity Modotti's sensuality, spirit, and conviction this extraordinary recreation of a remarkable life is a tightly woven blend of fact and fiction from "one of Mexico's leading literary figures." -The New York Times Book Review • Author is Mexico's preeminent woman of letters • Modotti's work has been the subject of major museum retrospectives around the country

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Using quotations from actual letters, characters under their actual names, and events straight out of history, Mexican novelist Elena Poniatowska has reimagined the life of actress and Communist agent Tina Modotti. Modotti was the lover of photographer Edward Weston, the friend of Diego Rivera and other artists, and an agent for the Soviet Union during the murky events of the Spanish Civil War. Poniatowska brushes aside questions of morality and politics to present Tina Modotti as an impetuous romantic, a heroine regardless of the rightness of her cause. The Spanish Civil War forms the backdrop for the last and most dramatic stage of Modotti's life: she was the lover of Vittorio Vidali, who specialized in assassinating anti-Stalinist leftists. Regardless of the stature of the book as literature, it gives a portrait of one of the most fascinating characters on the world stage between the World Wars. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

An intensely imagined, sensuously detailed account of the extraordinary life of photographer and militant revolutionary Tina Modotti (1896-1942), this compelling novel reflects the political and social turbulence of the 1920s through the '40s as experienced by a brave and vibrant woman who was an intimate of some of the leading poets, writers, artists and politicians of her time. Modotti lived various roles in her passionate life: she was a seamstress in San Francisco, an actress in silent films, a student and lover of photographer Edward Weston, a model for Diego Rivera's murals, an agent for the Soviet Union and always a cultural, intellectual and political vivant whose sensuous spirit captivated men and, for a time, the entire Mexican population (they called her Tinisima, a diminutive of her name but also an endearment). Tracing Modotti's footsteps to California, Mexico, Berlin, Moscow and Spain, Poniatowska adroitly interprets history without marginalizing the lyricism of Modotti's tragic quest for identity and true love. In Mexico in 1929, young Cuban revolutionary Julio Antonio Mella is assassinated while walking arm-in-arm with Modotti. Eager to rid the country of communist sympathizers, the government accuses Tina of his murder. Rivera and other prominent Mexican intelligentsia eventually help win her freedom. Expelled from Mexico, Modotti lives for a time in Moscow, becomes an agent for Red Aid, the international revolutionary organization, and works for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. Tired and ill, in 1939 she returns to Mexico, where she remains unrecognized until her death, when Pablo Neruda immortalizes her in a poem. One of Mexico's leading writers, Poniatowska (Dear Diego) has made an art form of blending journalism and fiction. She tells this novel in an urgent present tense, segueing among short, vivid scenes with cinematic virtuosity. Ten years of research and a thorough knowledge of the currents of history contribute to this portrait, but equally important is Poniatowska's intuitive appreciation of a woman shaped and destroyed by her tumultuous times.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (February 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140268766
• ISBN-13: 978-0140268768
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,916,435 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars !VIVA TINISIMA!, July 7, 2003

By 

MONTGOMERY (WASHINGTON, DC - U.S.A.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Tinisima (Paperback)

Before reading this novel, what I knew of Tina Modotti came from a single Edward Weston photograph. A beautiful woman with penetrating eyes.

Once I began to read "TINISIMA", I became utterly captivated with the life of Tina Modotti. Elena Poniatowska has a way of making the narrative read as if Tina Modotti herself were relating various happenings from her life to the reader, while the author adds her own commentaries as a supplement.

The more I read of this novel, the more I found myself curious about this woman and her life. It got to the point that I could hardly tear myself away from finishing this novel, though it pained me to see how Miss Modotti was manipulated and abused both by some of her friends/compatriots and the Stalinist system she once served so faithfully. I believe it was a mistaken faith, but I respect Miss Modotti for the courage of her convictions. She had good intentions, a big heart, but was prone to blind herself to the evils of Stalinism. Therein lies the ultimate tragedy of her life.

Tina Modotti could have gone on to become one of the greatest photographers of the last century had she not threw herself wholly into Marxist/Stalinist politics. Perhaps it is for that reason that she is not widely known today.

I wish I could have known Tina Modotti. I would have loved to have had lots of conversations with her in some café or small restaurant. While I'm sure we would not agree on a number of issues, I like to think we would have become close friends.

Thank you, Elena Poniatowska, for a beautiful book.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars El personaje ideal, March 6, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Tinisima (Paperback)

Tina Modotti es el personaje ideal para una novela fascinante. Eso es en realidad lo que Elena Poniatowska, con su prosa bella y precisa nos brinda con esta biografia. Su abarcador andar por la vida, sus vinculos con la vanguardia artistica, cultural y social de la epoca, son narrados afable y certeramente en este libro. Un panorama de epoca increible se nos brinda en estas lineas que nos traen una Tina llena de pasiones, ardiente amante, luchadora incansable, humana y trascendente: asi es tambien su historia.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A highwayscribery "Book Report", January 28, 2009

By 

Stephen Siciliano "the highway scribe" (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Tinisima (Paperback)

Mexico is like a noisy neighbor you do your best to avoid. A lot of the noise is unintelligible; in a different language.

Politicians want to build a wall to keep Mexican migrants out physically, but they might feel differently about our neighbors if language and culture were not the real barriers to that which might bridge the distance between us.

Understanding.

Mexican authoress Elena Poniatowska, for example, needs a translator. Barring calls from some important New York publisher seeking to enlist the scribe's bilingual talents, a brief discussion covering two of her books will have to serve as a small step toward the goal of mutual comprehension between our two cultures.

The writer was born Princess Helene Elizabeth Louise Amelie Paula Dolores Poniatowska Amor in France circa 1932. Her father was a Polish nobleman and her mother of Mexican nobility; something they must have had either prior to the revolution of 1910, or perhaps earlier, before the reforms of Benito Juarez.

She fled to Mexico during World War II and, in spite of her blue-blooded lineage, took up with the international left. This inclination comes forth loud and clear in her literature and in the columns she still pens for the progressive "La Jornada" out of Mexico City.

Her most famous work is "La Noche de Tlatelolco"; a journalistic work that recreates, through interviews and the perusal of public documents, the government's massacre of Mexican students in 1968.

In "El Tren Pasa Primero" (The Train Passes First), Poniatowska delivers a narrative and nonfictional portrait of a railroad workers union leader named Trinidad Pineda Chinas.

Thanks to a review of the book on a Spanish-language Web site "La Pagina de Cuentos" (The Story Page), we can tell you the actual subject is a gentleman by the name of Demetrio Vallejo.

Like Benito Juarez, Mexico's first indigenous president, Vallejo was an Indian from Oaxaca who grew up speaking Zapotec and had to learn Spanish along his difficult and arduous life path.

According to "The Story Page," Poniatowska interviewed the union leader extensively back in '70s and that work served as basis for "The Train Passes First."

It is a story in line with another book of hers, "Tinisima," about the actress, photographer, Soviet spy, and hospital nurse Tina Modotti in its scrupulous renderings of how rebels and militant leaders suffer at the hands of power.

Vallejo, a self-taught intellectual and telegraph worker employed with the then-national railway lines, took up cudgels against the government and the unions it was in cahoots with by forming a truly effective syndicate that delivered on bread-and-butter issues its members demanded.

So effective was Vallejo that in 1959 he paralyzed the country with a strike, forced the government's hand, and was thrown in jail for 11 years where he spent a lot of time defying brutal beatings, organizing common criminals against prison administrators, and hunger-striking.

Poniatowska opts for a shuffled narrative; later events recounted first, his odd youth as an overweight mama's boy in the tropical jungle next, followed by a strange and poignant epilogue wherein, if our Spanish is up to snuff, Vallejo/Chinas rides off (by train) into the sunset with his niece and loyal supporter Barbara, carrying his baby in her belly.

It is the story of an incorruptible public man with many private shortcomings that may ring familiar to those linked with the famous or supremely driven. He goes through women like water, his only wife leaving one day with the children never to see him again.

Very resourceful, Vallejo/Chinas manages to get himself a sultry, curvaceous women friend while in jail, but after he gets out and returns to "the fight," she tires of the routine and leaves, too.

In both books, Poniatowska spends a lot of time listing names of union members and leftist militants long-forgotten and, perhaps, known only to their contemporaries in the first place.

She seems to understand that rebels and outcasts are, well, cast out, pushed to the shadows by those who won the battles they lost and that, in writing a book, she can in some small way, recuperate them; inscribe their legacies on pages born of her own fight.

Kind to the workers movements of Mexico, "El Tren Pasa Primero" is also a loving tribute to the railroad itself. Poniatowski weaves beautiful passages that remind us that before there was a union of workers, endless meetings, and unmet demands, there was the powerful steam engine that promised escape from the mosquito-infested waterholes populated by peasants only waiting to be touched by word of that wondrous Mexico diverso.

Peasants like Vallejo.

"Tinisima," is the superior book probably because, all his nobility aside, Vallejo/Chinas can't hold a candle to Modotti in the personal story category.

A fox lady by anyone's standards, Modotti migrated with her family from Italy to San Francisco in the 20th Century's first years. Grown up fast, Tinisima went to Los Angeles and made for a fabulous flapper in silent films, made a lover of photography pioneer Edward Westin, who made a fabulous photographer out of her in turn.

Together they traveled to post-revolutionary Mexico and befriended Diego Rivera, Leon Trotsky and other politico/cultural luminaries of that scintillating (or so Poniatowska makes it seem) place and era.

A rampant seductress, Modotti met her match in a Cuban exile and communist revolutionary assassinated by government agents as they walked arm-in-arm down a Mexico City street.

Leaving everything about her sexy past behind, except for the cigarettes, Modotti became part of the 1930s international communist ferment, moved to Russia, and barely escaped the Gulag before going to Spain where she worked in a war hospital on the Republican side.

Modotti was forced to flee the advancing fascist army over the Pyrenees into France, assisting the famous Spanish poet Antonio Machado to peace and sad death on the other side.

Being a player in history can suck, but Modotti's story, especially the Spanish chapter as rendered by Poniatowska, is one of the most heart-wrenching renderings to be found in contemporary lit.

From there, with a few more dramas betwixt, Tin-EEEEE-sima winds up on a boat full of Spanish Civil War refugees denied port entry the world over. Somehow she gets to Mexico, which was very kind to Spanish expatriates, and tries to reconstruct a life, while being disillusioned by what she sees as a betrayal of the revolution's promise.

Like the many cigarettes she smoked throughout every sacrifice and adventure, Modotti, 48, extinguished quietly in the back of cab, exhausted by the life Poniatowska masterfully transmits to print.