Tinisima

Rating:
Summary: A heroine's life
Review:

I found this book to be a wonderful historical novel where prolific writer Elena Poniatowski blurs the lines between fact and fiction leaving you believing more than doubting the accuracy of the stories. As you read this book you will go back in time, to a time of Communist idealism that was creeping into Mexico, especially it's artists ideals, specifically the circle surrounding Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. More of a backdrop to the time period the book does not dwell on the relationship between Frida and Tina. It does however explore the Communist movement in Mexico right after the Mexican Revolution. Mostly the book explores the romantic life of Tina in her pursuit of a better society for mankind that takes her globe trotting from nation to nation, from one hot spot to another, hiding and seeking refuge, eluding police and authorities all the while in her quest for an ideal vision. Much of the book evolves around the time Tina spent in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. This along with her devotion to the men of her life including but not limited to photographer Edward Weston, Cuban communist Julio Mella and agent Vittorio are the passions that fueled her incredible life. Each chapter has a small black and white photograph from Tina Mondotti's archives. If you have never seen her photographs it is worth checking out. I have another book that features her photographs in Mexico and they are superb reflections of a time now only found in the remotest corners of Mexico. The story in this book has Tina accused of murder, implicated in murder or assassination, deported only to resurface and genrally moving about the globe on various passports and identities. Although this is a romantic version of her clandestine life it is based on thorough research. Incidently, in the current film version of Frida, Ashley Judd plays Tina in the torrid tango dance scene between her and Frida which reults in one of the more memorable visuals of the movie. Elena Poniatowski is a skilled writer who lets her passions dictate her style and the result is powerful image as to who the shadowy Tina Mondotti was. I would recommend this book to those that like historical novels, the Spanish Civil War, Mexico or the intrigue and story behind one of the most fascinating womens life in the early days of Communist spies . This is a grand novela featuring an extraordinary and intimate portrayal of a passionate woman.

Rating:
Summary: I was on a two month vacation in Mexico...
Review: and I could not put the book down. The importance of my Spanish immersion classes became secondary to the adventures and passion of Tina in Mexico and abroad. Poniatowska successfully gives readers a glimpse into the life of this artist and activist. Poniatowska gives attention to the social and political environment that contributed to Tina's transformation from a goddess to a committed communista who gave her life to the cause.

Rating:
Summary: !VIVA TINISIMA!
Review: Before reading this novel, what I knew of Tina Modotti came from a single Edward Weston photograph. A beautiful woman with penetrating eyes.

Once I began to read "TINISIMA", I became utterly captivated with the life of Tina Modotti. Elena Poniatowska has a way of making the narrative read as if Tina Modotti herself were relating various happenings from her life to the reader, while the author adds her own commentaries as a supplement.

The more I read of this novel, the more I found myself curious about this woman and her life. It got to the point that I could hardly tear myself away from finishing this novel, though it pained me to see how Miss Modotti was manipulated and abused both by some of her friends/compatriots and the Stalinist system she once served so faithfully. I believe it was a mistaken faith, but I respect Miss Modotti for the courage of her convictions. She had good intentions, a big heart, but was prone to blind herself to the evils of Stalinism. Therein lies the ultimate tragedy of her life.

Tina Modotti could have gone on to become one of the greatest photographers of the last century had she not threw herself wholly into Marxist/Stalinist politics. Perhaps it is for that reason that she is not widely known today.

I wish I could have known Tina Modotti. I would have loved to have had lots of conversations with her in some café or small restaurant. While I'm sure we would not agree on a number of issues, I like to think we would have become close friends.

Thank you, Elena Poniatowska, for a beautiful book.

Rating:
Summary: !VIVA TINISIMA!
Review: Before reading this novel, what I knew of Tina Modotti came from a single Edward Weston photograph. A beautiful woman with penetrating eyes.

Once I began to read "TINISIMA", I became utterly captivated with the life of Tina Modotti. Elena Poniatowska has a way of making the narrative read as if Tina Modotti herself were relating various happenings from her life to the reader, while the author adds her own commentaries as a supplement.

The more I read of this novel, the more I found myself curious about this woman and her life. It got to the point that I could hardly tear myself away from finishing this novel, though it pained me to see how Miss Modotti was manipulated and abused both by some of her friends/compatriots and the Stalinist system she once served so faithfully. I believe it was a mistaken faith, but I respect Miss Modotti for the courage of her convictions. She had good intentions, a big heart, but was prone to blind herself to the evils of Stalinism. Therein lies the ultimate tragedy of her life.

Tina Modotti could have gone on to become one of the greatest photographers of the last century had she not threw herself wholly into Marxist/Stalinist politics. Perhaps it is for that reason that she is not widely known today.

I wish I could have known Tina Modotti. I would have loved to have had lots of conversations with her in some café or small restaurant. While I'm sure we would not agree on a number of issues, I like to think we would have become close friends.

Thank you, Elena Poniatowska, for a beautiful book.

Rating:
Summary: Highly Recommended
Review: Elena Poniatowska is a fervent, eloquent, and important writer in Spanish about the plight of the disenfranchised. In "Tinisima," Poniatowska uses 1,000 pages of interviews, collected over 16 years, to imagine dialogue and interior monologues and from them to create a portrait of Tina Modotti and her times.

Modotti was Edward Weston's most beautiful model. For a few years in the late 1920s, until she lost her nerve (or maybe her artistic sensibility), she was herself a photographer of note. Later she labored in the vineyard of the Communist revolution, first in Moscow and later in Spain during the Spanish Civil War.

Yet if Modotti -- if, indeed, anyone -- is a fitting subject for an imagined biography, it is not because she was a larger-than-life character. As Poniatowska tells it, throughout her brief 45 years Modotti, the daughter of poor immigrants to Northern California from Northern Italy's poorest region, held unwaveringly to anarcho-syndicalist views, empathized with the poor and the victims of war, and searched for love in all the wrong places. So far, nothing exceptional. What makes her life interesting, of course, was her involvement, albeit at the edges, of sea changes in photography and painting, politics, totalitarianism, and war.

The writing style veers from accomplished dialogue to flat narrative, with little insight to the characters' motivation, to magic views of the cosmos, to cinematic stream of consciousness, as during Tina's death scene. This is a decent vacation read, full of local color, but you may come away from "Tinisima" wondering what justifies the superlative in the title.

Rating:
Summary: Smaller Than Life
Review: Elena Poniatowska is a fervent, eloquent, and important writer in Spanish about the plight of the disenfranchised. In "Tinisima," Poniatowska uses 1,000 pages of interviews, collected over 16 years, to imagine dialogue and interior monologues and from them to create a portrait of Tina Modotti and her times.

Modotti was Edward Weston's most beautiful model. For a few years in the late 1920s, until she lost her nerve (or maybe her artistic sensibility), she was herself a photographer of note. Later she labored in the vineyard of the Communist revolution, first in Moscow and later in Spain during the Spanish Civil War.

Yet if Modotti -- if, indeed, anyone -- is a fitting subject for an imagined biography, it is not because she was a larger-than-life character. As Poniatowska tells it, throughout her brief 45 years Modotti, the daughter of poor immigrants to Northern California from Northern Italy's poorest region, held unwaveringly to anarcho-syndicalist views, empathized with the poor and the victims of war, and searched for love in all the wrong places. So far, nothing exceptional. What makes her life interesting, of course, was her involvement, albeit at the edges, of sea changes in photography and painting, politics, totalitarianism, and war.

The writing style veers from accomplished dialogue to flat narrative, with little insight to the characters' motivation, to magic views of the cosmos, to cinematic stream of consciousness, as during Tina's death scene. This is a decent vacation read, full of local color, but you may come away from "Tinisima" wondering what justifies the superlative in the title.

Rating:
Summary: How do you separate the lover from the beloved?
Review: Elena Poniatowska loved Tina Modotti with a supernatural passion. Despite that she was able to write a panoramic epic with historical accuracy and scope that is breathtaking. I have read everything written about Tina Modotti that is available without special library or collection access, and this is clearly one of the best references.
But it is dangerous. There is a rapture here that might exceed the small frame of the tormented subject. Perhaps the almost religious raptures with which Poniatowska paints the prose story are better suited for hagiography than the life of a mere mortal.
For me, the aching emptiness in the middle of Tina's life is precisely mortal. She was a pilgrem on a very earthbound path, who had lost sight of any supernatural calling early in her childhood, if in fact it ever was a motive. Tina took care of everyone, and still managed to be brilliantly selfish. She found a place for every ambition and passion she felt, except for the desire for a family of her own.
It is difficult to tell her story right now. The true extent of Stalin's monstrosity has been overshadowed for fifty years by Hitler and the holocaust. It is only within the last few years that the enormity of betrayal underlying the outcome of the Spanish Civil War has begun to be understood and discussed in fair proportion. In the context of over-politicizing the external circumstances of women in the century, and the failure to understand Stalinism, the true story of Modotti can barely be heard above the clamor of militant mythologies.
Even if Poniatowska errors on the side of a romantic, impossibly representative 20th century woman at the expense of the true, earth bound person, it is worth the trouble trying to keep things in perspective. This is wonderful writing, and wonderful writing always threatens to obscure its subject. Caveat Lector, but if you have any interest in any aspect of this story, read the book.

Rating:
Summary: I was on a two month vacation in Mexico...
Review: Tina Modotti led a fascinating life. If it were ultimately tragic, well, whose isn't ? Born into a poor family in northwestern Italy, she emigrated with them to America as a teenager. She married young, to an artistic sort of fellow, got into the silent movies, went to Mexico with her husband, and fell in love with Edward Weston the famous photographer, who left his wife and family to be with her. As one of the bright lights and sexual epicenters of the Mexican artistic renaissance of the 1920s, Modotti sparkled like a Roman candle. Her last (and true ?) lover was a Cuban revolutionary who got himself assassinated by her side in 1929. She was almost 33. The Mexican government tried to implicate her in the murder, finally deporting her to Europe the following year, despite the best efforts of Diego Rivera and the Mexican Communist Party. From then on, Tina floundered. Germany did not suit her, life in Russia in the `30s was anything but pleasant---she subordinated all her individuality to the needs of the party. She became a Comintern agent in Europe, winding up in Spain, where she slaved away throughout the whole Civil War, fleeing to France at the end, and returning to Mexico with her faithless last husband, also a Communist Party operative. She died there in 1941.

OK, that's the outline of her life in a single paragraph. If you want to know how she fit into all the various circles of her acquaintance, if you want to know what Tina thought about any of this, if you would like any sort of psychological grasp of what makes a person live this way, why so much insecurity, why the need to be controlled (ideas that don't even come up in this shallow work)---then, for God's sake, read another book. This is a journalistic, fictionalized biography. Nothing wrong there, such things could be excellent. It depends on what journal we are talking about, though. TINISIMA, in my opinion, derives from the "National Enquirer". We definitely learn about her sexual activities and feelings, because the writer had her eye firmly on the marketplace. We waltz through her love life, but Tina remains an enigma. We are treated to endless cascades of names, some of which may be more familiar in Mexico than in North America, true, but still the presence of many can only be likened to cameo appearances in certain flashy Hollywood movies. Ernest Hemingway, Leon Trotsky, Frida Kahlo, Palmiro Togliatti, Norman Bethune, Lazaro Cardenas, William Z. Foster, Octavio Paz, Garcia Lorca---the list is endless, but to what purpose ? As a novel, not a biography, Poniatowska could have portrayed Modotti's character as deeply and intimately as she wanted. There was nothing to stop her. Instead, we get "People" magazine.

I don't know another book about Tina Modotti unfortunately. I wanted to find out more about her, and, after a fashion, I did by reading TINISIMA, but I believe the real biography, fictional or serious, has yet to be written. The praises lavished on the book on the frontispiece and back cover should be taken with a large number of grains of salt. This book is seriously flawed-it is neither a biography nor a good novel. 3 stars is a generous rating.