The Review of Contemporary Fiction
The Incantation of Frida K by Kate BravermanPeter Donahue
Kate Braverman. The Incantation of Frida K. Seven Stories, 2002. 235 pp. $23.95.
Kate Braverman’s new novel presents a first-person testimony of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. As the artist lies on her deathbed at age forty-six, she recalls her tortured, unrepentant life of boundaries violated and practiced vanishing. Her recursive narrative begins with the polio that cripples her and the sexual abuse that traumatizes her as a child, followed by the trolley-car accident that deforms and sterilizes her at seventeen, when she begins painting. From there it ranges through her masochistic marriage to the muralist Diego Rivera; her addictions to opium, morphine, and Demerol; her nocturnal exploration of the backstreets and alleys of San Francisco, New York, Paris, and Mexico City; her conception, delivery, abortion, and abandonment of an imagined daughter; her encounters with Picasso, Breton, Rockefeller, Morgan, and Trotsky; and her paintings, “postcards sent from ports not yet identified.” She rejects Breton’s insistence that she is a surrealist: “It had nothing to do with symbols”; “I am painting reality. This is not a dream.” As her teeth fall out and she loses a leg to gangrene, she trades her body, as she perceives it, for her canvas. This deformed and corrupted Frida, the one who lures and repulses Rivera, is costumed by him (and herself) for public display (and “obvious theater”) in Aztec beads and amulets, eyeliner and rouge, and traditional Mexican apparel. She condemns Rivera for his cowardice as a painter and curses him as a sycophant forever seeking commissions. From the novel’s opening line, Frida’s voice is fierce and incantatory in tone, lurid and evocative in its imagery—much of which derives from her paintings. Far from the romanticized view of the artist in Irving Stone’s 1953 Lust for Life, The Incantation of Frida K. is a sharply poetic and piercing psychological examination of the artist’s life and work, and of how the two adhere. [Peter Donahue]