Beauty Is Convulsive: The Passion of Frida Kahlo (Hardcover)

by Carole Maso (Author) "She draws..." (more)
Key Phrases: plaster corset, way color, Fulang Chang, New York, Weekly Sales (more...)

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: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #626,304 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in these categories: (What's this?)

  #21 in	Books > Arts & Photography > Artists, A-Z > ( J-L ) > Kahlo, Frida
  #60 in	Books > Nonfiction > Automotive > Traffic & Safety

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" (Norfolk, VA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

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 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.