The Incantation of Frida K Book

Our bodies are ultramarine like suffering and sweet masks and returning to the terrace in the last light, in a stalled transparency, longing for boats and splendor. Free fall and we know the violets and the postures of loss in winter. Diego. How we talked of love and awe while leaves scattered in complications of violet and jade. When we beat the linens clean on rock and draped teeth around our necks like captured moons. Before free fall and blistered autumn, when our lips became maps of where the taint lies. That was before the hard ceremonies, when we were cold and gave testament, when we swam out to meet all the ships, when we stood on terraces anointed by rain, when we lived in a country of rivers that had all names.

Delirious - that is the only word to describe this book. I loved it at the same time I want to laugh at the immaturity of it. At its worst, this book is a rant; the self-pitying, angst-addled ramblings of a delusional narcissist and at its best, this book is what happens when poetry decides to luxuriously unspool and spread its scintillating feathers, softly stretch its furry paws, shake its opulent, iridescent mane and drunkenly, wantonly dance into the sunset. I was drunk on this book; Braverman's prose mesmerized me, made me forget time, reality. I read this book while recovering from flu. Perhaps it was the combination of clogged nose, cough mixture and reconstituted chicken soup, or perhaps it was the way she threaded her words - creating a fantastic paradise that could only be invented by a deranged imagination…. the vibrancy, the metaphors composed of warm spices and autumnal smells, emotions corpulent with delectable richness, so plush, so abounding that I was left breathless.

A stalled harbor. Paralyzed. Becalmed. The water is fragile, translucent, the texture of some intrinsic confusion that lingers. I am the river concluding in the sea. I am coming home.
Between a concussion of sky and ocean, elegant, like a suggestion of bleached violets, I have drifted to a seaport in mist. Perhaps all the inhabitants have vanished. And I cannot determine if what I hear is rain or waves. Does it matter? There is no actual line between drowning and communion.
It's a spring of remission. Morning is a sequence of tamed waves rising and falling like strings of clear glass bells. I paint in my wheelchair. In between the azure gulfs and eddies of morphine, I paint in my canopied bed. My bed was lost for a while, I don't remember how, but now it has been returned to me.

I could have easily given this book a five star if not for that undercurrent of smug laziness I could detect in the writing. Prose tumbled into prose, images unfolded in luscious cornucopia, metaphors mutated, soared, drunk, dazed and dancing and soon you start getting a sickening feel of having eaten too much cake, the one that has multiple layers, sprinkles, adornments and frostings of different flavors. The one that sticks to the roof of your mouth in a cloying, sugary lump.

There was too much saccharine - as if an overenthusiastic baker was trying to cover up a slipup with generous amount of butter and sugar. Half-way into the book, the repetitions starts to nag you - descriptions of autumns, the colours, the gardens, the drugged ravings, Digeo turning into a larger than life villain. Perhaps it makes sense as Braverman is trying to portray the Demerol and morphine fogged mind of a dying woman. But somewhere, the scrumptiously layered profusion seems to be an attempt to cover up the lack of a concise characterization or a narrative structure. There are no loose ends because everything is infused and plumped with sugared violets and candied roses, characters are richly painted and boxed in ornate frames to seem real, the narrative meandered, teased, tortured and eventually left me gasping with its malicious beauty.

I cannot claim to have understood the book. But I tasted it, felt it swelling, pulsating and breaking inside me brimming me with silken textures, moist orchards and kaleidoscopic visuals. I suffocated in that air soaked in liquescent light and swirling colours. A part of me was left bemused trying to feel something, anything for those miserable, self-centered characters yet another part of me splintered into a million fragments when I turned the last page.