Frida.

• Author: Holmer, Joan Ozark
• Position: Books: instinct, intellect, and obsession

Frida, by Barbara Mujica. New York: Overlook, 2001.

In her intriguing new novel Frida, Barbara Mujica has given us a captivating fictionalized biography. Frida captures the private and public worlds of the Mexican painter. Frida Kahlo, who was famous for her eccentric creativity, her narcissistic self-dramatization. her gutsy perseverance, and her traumatic life. Mujica's well-crafted verbal portrait of this modern self-portraitist. "whose brows form a bird in flight" will haunt the memories of her readers long after they this compelling novel.

As historically knowledgeable as she is psychologically insightful, Mujica sets Frida's personal story within the broader political and artistic of Mexico in the first half of the twentieth century. This period of history enlivens the narrative, with figures like Leon Trotsky, John D. Rockefeller, Edsel Ford, Dolores Del Rio, Maria Felix, and Paulette Goddard appearing at appropriate moments. But it is the central story of the complicated sibling relationship between Frida and her younger sister by eleven months, Cristina, that tantalizes the imagination.

In life, Frida took center stage, while Cristi hovered in the wings as her understudy. but in her novel Mujica gains powerful perspective on Frida by creating a primarily fictional voice for the historically real Cristi, who tells both their stories as she interprets them. As If in dialogue with a psychiatrist who remains invisible and mute, Cristi confesses the domestic secrets that lie behind Frida's public success.

Through the revelation of her own inner life, Cristi consequently becomes a fascinating character, disturbingly self-divided between her love for and resentment of her acclaimed sister.

The novel opens with their childhood, and Cristi's grateful admiration for Frida's defiant protection of them against the taunts of schoolyard bullies who mock the sisters' paternal Jewish heritage. The novel closes with Cristi's continual nursing of her bed-ridden and acutely suffering sister, who dies at the age of forty-six after having endured a leg amputation. During the course of the novel Frida's life and horizons expand, while Cristi's seem to contract as she stays at home, quits school early, experiences a failed marriage, raises two children, and takes care of her ailing parents. But while Cristi acknowledges the superior intelligence of Frida, she also recognizes her own superior beauty. Cristi takes guilty comfort in the...