=Books Recently Read=

Beauty is Convulsive: The Passion of Frida Kahlo by Carole Maso. I'm a big Carole Maso fan. I've been so ever since reading her inspiring book on writing as if your life depended on it: Break Every Rule: Essay on Language, Longing, and Moments of Desire. Her novels The Art Lover and The American Woman in the Chinese Hat put some of her theory into practice. Therefore I'm not the most objective critic of Beauty is Convulsive, but I can say this with confidence: you're not likely to have read anything else like it, not on Frida Kahlo, not on anything else.

Beauty is Convulsive is not so much a novel as it is a book-length free-verse ecstatic poem, a "deeply personal mediation" in which Maso attempts to "be in some kind of dialog with (Kahlo) across time and space." Quoting further from Maso's end notes, Beauty is Convulsive is not even a book, per se, but an act of "communion." Indeed, at various points in the narrative, Maso breaks into the fragmented, multi-perspective recounting of Kahlo's story to directly address the reader; at other times she addresses Frida herself in a highly charged language of adoration and eroticism that amounts to a literary copulation.

Maso informs the reader that her book was conceived after reading the illustrated journal Kahlo kept at the end of her life. Kahlo's deathbed diary recorded the artist's final vision of the passionate, turbulent festival that she fashioned from her all-too-human, all-too-vulnerable mortality and her apotheosis from woman to artist to legend.

Kahlo mythologized her life in terms as blazing and bloody as any Aztec sacrifice and Maso attempts to dial it up another notch still. She mainly succeeds. But I imagine that this book would be difficult to follow, maybe even incomprehensible, if you aren't already familiar with the details of Kahlo's life, which I was, having read Hayden Herrera's celebrated biography, Frida. To her credit, Maso herself acknowledges her debt not only to Kahlo's diary but to Herrera's biography in the notes, writing in no uncertain terms that Beauty is Convulsive is "utterly reliant" on the latter book. Having read Herrera's biography, the reader of Beauty is Convulsive can easily recognize the spare and elliptical references that Maso cites in this highly poeticized and deeply personal form of participatory biography.

That this is a book for Frida Kahlo fans goes without saying; but what does need saying is that this is a book for informed Frida Kahlo fans. While the language and imagery, by turns violent and beautiful, of Maso's text is powerful enough to carry the day on it's own, Beauty is Convulsive won't be much help to anyone seeking to learn what they don't already know about Kahlo's life and times. Don't come here for that; come here when you already know the facts, and want the transfiguration of facts.

Beauty is Convulsive (or not at all) is actually a quote from Andre Breton, who, ironically, Frida Kahlo did not like. She found the poet to be pompous, didactic, overbearing, and overly intellectual, qualities befitting a man who was often derisively referred to as "the pope of surrealism." An odd choice, then, on one level for a book on Kahlo...on another level, given the facts of her life, perfectly apropos.