Review: The Secret Book of Frida Kahlo
F. G. Haghenbeck 282 pages Oceano (2018)
Read this if you like: Magical realism, Mexican culture, speculative non-fiction
tl;dr summary: Frida Kahlo’s life story, mostly.
I’ve been enamored with Frida Kahlo’s art since I was a teenager, and I knew the big-picture outlines of her life, but I’ve never delved into the details of her biography. That added an extra layer of fun to the reading experience of The Secret Book of Frida Kahlo. There were some things I could sort clearly into fact or fiction categories, but much of the plot fell into a nebulous in between place, details that read as plausible (at least, for Frida Kahlo) but not aspects of her story I knew already. Combined with the dreamy intrusions of her Madrina, this gave the narrative a mythological feel, turning Frida into a legendary version of the real painter, and I was tickled by this play with reality.
Now, after I finished the book, I did have to investigate some of the high-profile celebrity trysts that Frida is shown having in the course of the book. For anyone who’s curious, she did indeed have an affair with Trotsky while he was in exile in Mexico from 1937-1939. There’s no evidence that she ever had a sexual relationship with Georgia O’Keeffe, though (although they were friends), and there are other friendships and encounters in the book that are likely inventions of the author.
And then there’s the matter of the libro de hierba santa itself. It certainly seems possible—in fact, rather likely—that Frida would have maintained a recipe book during her life, because she did love to cook. If this book exists, though, no one has shared it yet; the epistolary elements in this novel are fictional (though they certainly seem like functional recipes, and I do intend to try at least one in the near future).
This is a bit ironic, considering the role these recipes end up serving in the book: they ground the reader into Frida’s reality. While she may not have been physically larger than life like Diego, Frida’s persona was. Picturing her with flour on her hands makes her feel more accessible. The frequent uses of food throughout the book also engage the reader’s tastes and smell, creating a richer and more immersive world.
From a craft perspective, the most intriguing thing about this book for me was the way it blurred the lines of genres that normally belong on completely different shelves. There are aspects of it that are biography and food writing, and others that push toward magical realism and speculative tropes. Through her near-death, Frida becomes someone who exists in two worlds. She’s seen behind the veil and knows what’s waiting for her at the end of her suffering. That’s macabre in a sense but also powerfully optimistic. She knows her life will be full of pain but seizes it anyway, and in a sense it’s knowing what waits for her on the other side that allows her to endure it.
It helps that there’s a smirk of humor threaded even through the most difficult chapters of Frida’s life. The imagery of the rooster as her kind of “soul twin” is one example of this, and was one of my favorite threads tying the narrative together. From the very start, the reader knows she’ll make the choice eventually to consume the unnaturally-aged bird, though the full significance of that decision isn’t revealed until later. The way Frida smiled in the face of pain and death is what gives her art such enduring power, and it shines through beautifully in this reimagining of her life.
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