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A review by brogan7
Frida Kahlo: The Story of Her Life by Vanna Vinci
adventurous
challenging
emotional
informative
sad
fast-paced
4.0
This visual biography of Frida Kahlo is so intensely Frida that it is hard to critique it. She is such an inspiring personage and the author/illustrator of this book evidently reveres her so it's hard to say, separate from that, hmm, how does this piece inform the literature about her?
Also I learned so much that again, I am not enough of a scholar to question some parts!
The book was enjoyable, informative, and visually vibrant, echoing Frida's work.
The parts that I found detracted from it were that so much of the art was evidently derivative of Frida's work, that I wondered at the re-doing...I wanted to see originals. I wondered a bit at this choice of re-creating works that are so personal, so integral, that redoing them seems a bit like a subduing of their original energy and expression. It felt presumptuous to recreate so much of her art. (Maybe particularly because I've tried to sketch some Frida Kahlo, and I discovered as I did so that her art was so meticulous and...almost loving...that I felt I could not quickly sketch with inferior materials what she had painted.) The bold strokes of the author-illustrator work for some scenes that Frida would never have painted herself, as a graphic novel presentation of her life, but when it comes to re-creating her art, the same bold strokes feel like shortcuts, and shortcuts that in and of themselves betray the original purpose of the works.
Secondly, I wondered at the appropriation of Frida's voice (it's told in first person), because again, that's so personal and so peculiar, how can we say what Frida thought? I found her reactions to her miscarriages, for instance, was very flattened and kind of undertold, whereas my understanding from previous readings and from looking at her art was that she was heartbroken over her miscarriages (particularly as time went on, and she understood she would not bear a child). I felt this telling didn't really communicate her heartache.
And finally, I have to object to the section about her painful operations and her attitude to her own pain and to her surgeries. It's been said elsewhere and it's been said more than once that she was "obsessed with herself" and she was counting on the next surgery to help her, to an unhealthy point where she just wanted surgery, surgery, surgery... and this book goes into that (in her own voice, agreeing, like it was something flippant, oh yeah well I was addicted to drugs by then, and yeah, I just wanted more surgeries...).
But anyone who has experienced chronic pain or prolonged, intense pain would understand that when you are in that situation, you want more surgeries because that is what is called hope. The doctors promised the surgery would help her, and when it was so much worse after, of course she thought--because they also told her this--that it was an error they could correct. Recasting this as unhealthy self-obsession is just a total lack of compassion and it enrages me that she would be made to say this in her own voice. (She may have been self-obsessed at many points in her life and that's fine if you want to say that, but at this particular moment of her intense and prolonged years of suffering, that is not only unfeeling and cruel, it is also particularly misogynistic because it undermines her own experience of her body, as though she was just exaggerating, being melodramatic.)
Although these seem to be heavy criticisms, I really did enjoy the book a lot.
Also I learned so much that again, I am not enough of a scholar to question some parts!
The book was enjoyable, informative, and visually vibrant, echoing Frida's work.
The parts that I found detracted from it were that so much of the art was evidently derivative of Frida's work, that I wondered at the re-doing...I wanted to see originals. I wondered a bit at this choice of re-creating works that are so personal, so integral, that redoing them seems a bit like a subduing of their original energy and expression. It felt presumptuous to recreate so much of her art. (Maybe particularly because I've tried to sketch some Frida Kahlo, and I discovered as I did so that her art was so meticulous and...almost loving...that I felt I could not quickly sketch with inferior materials what she had painted.) The bold strokes of the author-illustrator work for some scenes that Frida would never have painted herself, as a graphic novel presentation of her life, but when it comes to re-creating her art, the same bold strokes feel like shortcuts, and shortcuts that in and of themselves betray the original purpose of the works.
Secondly, I wondered at the appropriation of Frida's voice (it's told in first person), because again, that's so personal and so peculiar, how can we say what Frida thought? I found her reactions to her miscarriages, for instance, was very flattened and kind of undertold, whereas my understanding from previous readings and from looking at her art was that she was heartbroken over her miscarriages (particularly as time went on, and she understood she would not bear a child). I felt this telling didn't really communicate her heartache.
And finally, I have to object to the section about her painful operations and her attitude to her own pain and to her surgeries. It's been said elsewhere and it's been said more than once that she was "obsessed with herself" and she was counting on the next surgery to help her, to an unhealthy point where she just wanted surgery, surgery, surgery... and this book goes into that (in her own voice, agreeing, like it was something flippant, oh yeah well I was addicted to drugs by then, and yeah, I just wanted more surgeries...).
But anyone who has experienced chronic pain or prolonged, intense pain would understand that when you are in that situation, you want more surgeries because that is what is called hope. The doctors promised the surgery would help her, and when it was so much worse after, of course she thought--because they also told her this--that it was an error they could correct. Recasting this as unhealthy self-obsession is just a total lack of compassion and it enrages me that she would be made to say this in her own voice. (She may have been self-obsessed at many points in her life and that's fine if you want to say that, but at this particular moment of her intense and prolonged years of suffering, that is not only unfeeling and cruel, it is also particularly misogynistic because it undermines her own experience of her body, as though she was just exaggerating, being melodramatic.)
Although these seem to be heavy criticisms, I really did enjoy the book a lot.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Infidelity, Sexual content, Toxic relationship, Blood, Medical content, Medical trauma, Injury/Injury detail
Moderate: Miscarriage, Suicidal thoughts, Suicide
Minor: Chronic illness, Death, Drug abuse, Sexism, Pregnancy