The Incantation of Frida K.

By Kate Braverman

Book Overview

"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 Andr 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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1583224696
• ISBN13: 9781583224694
• Release Date: March 2002
• Publisher: Seven Stories Press
• Length: 235 Pages
• Weight: 0.96 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.9" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

An absorbing and engagingly imaginative read

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.

A Rare Imagination

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.

The Incantations of Frida K.

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.

Braverman =Intelligence

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.

Beauty vs Biography

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.