This is by Claire Berest. It's a novel about the life of Frida Kahlo (1907-54), and it was originally published in French in 2019. An English translation, by Stephanie Smee, came out this year.

The original is called Rien n'est noir (Nothing Is Black), which is a direct quote from Kahlo ("nothing is black, truly nothing"), and it's a much better title. The title of the German translation is Das Leben ist ein Fest (Life Is a Party), which again I think is better than the anodyne "Frida".

I actually wanted to read it in French, but Douglas Library had the translation, so I thought I'd save some money, and go with that. I'm not actually sure this was the right decision... It's the kind of book, the kind of style, that would have read better in French, I think.



I am not as enthusiastic about Frida as most people are. It was recommended on Five Books: "It’s like wandering through a painting -- riotous with colour, overflowing with imagery. I had moments where I almost had to stop reading to take a breath, but it captures something of Frida herself that feels totally right. If you want to be absolutely steeped in her world, you’ll love it." And on Goodreads (which is definitely not the Bible -- I know the problems -- I'm just using it as a rule of thumb), the French version scores 4.06 (out of 5) on 2,703 ratings, with 76 per cent giving 4 or 5 stars, while the English version (much newer, remember) scores 3.80 on 46 ratings, with 62 per cent giving 4 or 5 stars. According to Bibliosurf, the response has mostly been enthusiastic. (That site quotes just one negative review, which sums up: "While the fate of this extraordinary woman is fascinating, I didn't find myself responding to Claire Berest's writing" (but also notes having otherwise read only positive reactions).

Anyway, there we are, cards on the table, I'm very much in the minority by not being bowled over.

I think part of the reason for my lukewarm reaction was my relative familiarity with the actual story of Frida Kahlo's extraordinary life. I'd already watched a doco, and done some reading around that. I think if you come to this novel cold, you're more likely to be beguiled by it purely because of the sheer drama of the life it relates.


California, 2001. While in the US, Kahlo and husband Diego Rivera go on chauffeur-driven trips through a state that's home to both sequoias and orange trees. Rivera is in his element. "To Frida, he is never so chipper as when he's not in Mexico, this man who is Mexico's greatest painter"

***

There were a few specific things I wasn't keen on:

1. I was puzzled by the genre. To what extent is this a NOVEL, as opposed to a rather lyrical bio with some imagined conversations? Of course, the novel format leaves the author freer to be selective with the timeframe and the incidents she recounts (aside from a few flashbacks, the text focuses on 1928-40, and then jumps forward to Kahlo's final year). I guess actual biographers feel constrained to keep their coverage more even, and perhaps to be more prosaic in their approach. But somehow this felt to me not so much a novel as a meditation on a life.

2. Within the timeframe covered, there's quite a lot of jumping around, and the approach in general is quite elliptical. If I didn't know much about Kahlo's life, I think I'd be constantly banging things into a search engine to find out more. The detail, for me, was a little blurry.

3. I found the colour-coding of the chapters distracting rather than illuminating. There are four sections, each designated by a colour:

Mexico City, 1928: Blue
United States, 1930-32: Red;
Mexico City, New York, Paris, 1933-40: Yellow
Mexico, 1954: Ivory Black.

Within each section, the chapters are given more specific colours. For example: Cobalt blue; steel blue; royal blue; ultramarine; sky blue... And each of these colour titles is then given a kind of gloss. For example:

Ultramarine: Warm blue drifting to violet
Carmine Red: Glaring red
Blood Red: Organic red with bluish tinges
Fresh Butter Yellow: Pale yellow that smells of frost
Blushing Yellow: Sunset shot through with it

I found this practice rather irritating, and had to stop myself searching through the text for the occurrence of the colour... Probably my bad, though. Many readers thoroughly embraced this idea, and found it rich and evocative.

And, in fairness, it comes straight out of Kahlo's own colour descriptions in her diaries:


A page from The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait, 1995. The diary, says editor Sarah M. Lowe, is characterized by "an almost obsessive return to a handful of themes. One, of course, is Kahlo's devotion to and love for Rivera... Kahlo is endlessly inventive in her casting of their roles in their complementary and symbiotic relationship. Among the most interesting is her envisioning of their connection through art: in several passages she refers to 'auxocromo' and 'cromoforo', the yin and yang of color. He, auxocromo, captures color; she, cromoforo, gives color." At one point, she writes: "He doesn't see the color. He has the color"


Again from Kahlo's diary: "I'll try out the pencils sharpened to the point of infinity which always sees ahead..."

***

What was to like, then?

1. Well, the narrative opens with Diego Rivera -- not Frida. Understandably. (Read that other post.) And it does portray their tortured relationship very well. There's an illuminating little exchange that occurs when Rivera asks for a divorce:

She: "Nobody can love you the way I do."
He: "As long as you're in my face, I will never be free."

Which kind of sums up their dilemma.

Kahlo is on record as saying: "I suffered two grave accidents in my life. One in which a streetcar knocked me down... The other accident is Diego."

Berest shows how Kahlo first had to struggle to emerge from behind her husband's enormous shadow. After four years of marriage, she is still playing the role of the spouse, running around being his publicity, creating his image. It's not that she's ever jealous of his art. They're not in a competition in that area. And he genuinely respects her work, and encourages her.

But it is painful to see the relationship in action. Rivera's affair with Kahlo's sister is introduced with brilliant brevity:

"Diego has an affair with Cristina.
"Cristina has an affair with Diego.
"Frida does not know how she is supposed to make sense of this."

That's the whole chapter...


Memory, the Heart, 1937. Another of Kahlo's bleeding hearts, this time expressing her misery over the affair between Rivera and Cristina. Here, her hair is cropped, and her face a mass of tears

In the final chapter, after Kahlo's death, we have a flashback to the way she might have perceived the relationship with this colossus to whom she seemed shackled: "By wanting to seek shelter in you, I lost sight of the fact that you were the storm. That I should have been sheltering from you. But who wants to live like that, sheltered from the storm?" I'm not sure if these words are taken from her writing, but they sum things up pretty well.

2. The text is often perceptive and thought-provoking on the subject of Kahlo's art.

She starts painting while she's still recuperating from a life-changing accident, and Berest tries to portray the tangle of motivations involved:

"Frida paints for Alejandro, she paints to forget the wreckage of her legs... Frida paints for her sister Matita, who reads her poems without understanding them, for her mother's first fiance, who committed suicide right in front of her. Frida paints because her mother has never spoken of it, she paints for her vagina, perforated by a metal rod, for her sister Cristina whom she adores even if they argue relentlessly... Frida paints... because she wanted to be a doctor, because she was one of the first women to be accepted into the Preparatoria, she paints because she will not be continuing with her studies, she paints... because when she paints she doesn't think -- she dances like a wild thing but without moving...

"Of course, Frida does not paint for any of those reasons, because she paints for no reason, without resolution, without ambition, she doesn't know why she paints and she doesn't even ask herself the question. It soothes her."

After her first solo exhibition in New York, painting is no longer "just one aspect of herself, one of many". Now it's a "necessary activity, the golden thread of her days". She likes detail, and paints in a single burst of activity. "She just paints what she sees," she says. Which is not necessarily what the rest of us see... "She is not painting to be loved. She is transparent, which is to say she's throwing open a window to her interior universe."

Kahlo took exception to the preface written by Surrealist Andre Breton to the New York exhibition catalogue ("the art of Frida Kahlo is a ribbon around a bomb..."): "He has not understood a thing; he doesn't get it. Frida is not painting her dreams, nor her subconscious -- she is painting an interior necessity. The truth of her disarray."

Her artistic quest is very different from her husband's: "Diego paints the whole world on walls, searching for some transcendental brilliance. Frida paints detail on to minuscule canvases and is not looking for anything. And yet she captures the whole world."

Through the eyes of Leon Trotsky (he and his wife lived with Rivera and Kahlo for a while), Berest teases out some more aspects of this difference:

"Rivera's world: Marxist, glorious revolution in victory's aftermath, history in progress, doctrinaire spirit too, man as part of an ensemble of classes, personalities rather that people, no real faces, interchangeable puppets, soldiers for the cause, forever youthful bodies.

"Frida's world: rebelling against any doctrinairism, a woman, the woman, her suffering, alone in the desert, the irreducible part of being human, existential suffering."



3. There's some interesting insight into the differing ways her family experienced the revolution in Mexico:

"What she does not tell her fellow dinner companions is that the capitulation of the Diaz dictatorship sounded the death knell for the Kahlo family's comfort and stability. Her mother, Matilde, who had come to the assistance of the guerrillas, was certainly not as enamoured with the situation as Frida would have people believe. Prior to the civil war, her father, Guillermo, made a very good living from government commissions, having been asked to create a sort of photographic inventory of monuments from pre-Spanish and colonial times. His work had facilitated a comfortable upper-class life style and the handsome, lavish Coyoacan house built to Guillermo Kahlo's own design had to be mortgaged when the Porfiriato years came to an end. As a young girl at the start of the civil war, Frida did not experience her parents' fall in social circumstances as they did... Her impetuous temperament resulted in transforming her into a pasionaria of the cause, leading her to marry into Diego's ideology at the same time as she married the man. The young painter adored the communist liturgy...

"Frida's political tastes are a reflection of fetishes: songs chanted, comrades addressed in familiar tones, hammers and sickles worn in buttonholes."

Having read Janice Helland's article on Kahlo's politics, though, I wonder whether this could profitably have been fleshed out a bit.


From Frida's diary

4. Berest portrays very evocatively the way Kahlo embodies much of the philosophy of Aestheticism. She didn't just make art. She really was someone who made her life an art-form.

Her kitchen, for example: Tiny pots spelling out the names Diego and Frida. A parrot. Flowers. Monkeys. Fruit. This is where she receives guests. There's no standing on ceremony: "She is the ceremony, with her dresses and jewels, her golden teeth, her songs and her mispronunciations, her eccentric ideas and her depraved temptress behaviour and her infinite tenderness for everyone, man, woman or object."

Art historian MacKinley Helm tells her that she and Diego have become a kind of myth: "Don't try to tell me you're not aware of being some sort of fantastical character."

And when she was deemed too ill to attend the first exhibition of her art in her home-country, in 1953, she confounded everyone by arriving on a stretcher, and presiding over the gathering enthroned on her own four-poster bed, which had been brought in for the occasion. She was skin and bone, says Berest, but sumptuously dressed. And people touch her as though she's a saint.

***

I guess my advice would be: Read this, but don't read only this.