On Bullfighting

by A.L. Kennedy

Book Overview

An Anchor Books Original One day, on the brink of despair and contemplating her own mortality, novelist A. L. Kennedy is offered an assignment she can't refuse-an opportunity to travel to Spain and cover a sport that represents the ultimate confrontation with death: bullfighting. The result is this remarkable book, which takes Kennedy and her readers from the living room of her Glasgow flat to the plazas del toros of Spain and inside the mesmerizing,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0385720815
• ISBN13: 9780385720816
• Release Date: March 2001
• Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
• Length: 176 Pages
• Weight: 0.49 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

A Rare Woman's Perspective of the Bullfight

I found Ms. Kennedy's work emotional and passionate and a very good addition to taurine-related literature. It's refreshing to have a woman's take on the bloody and beautiful spectacle of bullfighting. I'm a huge fan of the corrida, toros bravos and toreros. But other than Sarah Pink's study into women and the corrida, I have read no other booklength works from a female perspective. Ms. Kennedy paints a fresh and feminine view on an ancient and often misunderstood ritual and brings the corrida to a set of readers who may otherwise be confused or bored with more technical pieces or a complex insider's book like Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon. It was also good to see that her assignment swept her away from a potential nasty self-inflicted ending that would have left us without a very good piece of writing. This work is worthy of two thumbs up.

as good as English-language taurine writing gets

On Bullfighting is the product of a commission Ms. Kennedy received while deeply mired in depression and plagued by writer's block. One can be grateful for the stroke of editorial genius that suggested to someone that Kennedy, with no taurine background whatsoever, might be profitably set to this particular task. In lesser hands that would be a recipe for disaster (or at least near-mediocrity - witness the shallow, 1998, celebrity-struck, efforts of Eamonn O'Neill in Matadors: A journey into the heart of modern bullfighting, barely more satisfying than a People magazine feature story). What emerged from Kennedy's brief research (brief, one might surmise from the short, seven-title bibliography - Belmonte, Conrad, Fulton, Hemingway (2), McCormick, and Sánchez /Durán), her viewing of historic corridas on film, and her attendance at a half dozen bullfights during the 1998 and 1999 Iberian temporadas, is a minor miracle - a work of value for the initiated and uninitiated alike.Kennedy gives us enough history to reveal some of the threads that tie the present day phenomenon to its historic antecedents, and tentatively explores some links that more timid, inside observers have overlooked - like the similarities between the bullfight's rituals and the auto-da-fé of the Spanish Inquisition. She bravely wades into an examination of the nature and sources of duende (the taurine world's counterpart to Justice Stewart's "I can't define it, but I know it when I see it"), and she touches on the critical issues plaguing the present day corrida - weakened taurine bloodlines, horn shaving and other pre-corrida attacks on the central creatures' integrity, the celebritization of the festival, the organized vogue of anti-taurine animus. She gives us a meditation on death and the courage to face it, as honestly drawn when describing the events on the sand, as when describing her own personal demons - and a meditation on the generic nature of "vocation," its manifestations in the mundo taurino and in the literary world. On Bullfighting was not meant to be an aficionado's handbook, detailing the differences in the myriad of cape passes, the differences in traje embroidery styles, the historic roots of every modern taurine manifestation inherited from the bullfight's speculative historical antecedents. It is a brief, impressionistic look at a complex cultural phenomenon seen through the eyes of a brutally honest observer, and described with the well-wielded tools of a major literary craftsman. In this, it shares a literary place similar to that held in the mundo cuadrilátero by Joyce Carol Oates' similarly titled, similarly insightful work, On Boxing.All this is woven into a concise, sensitive narrative that chronicles one woman's self-guided, absolutely non-tendentious exploration of the mundo taurino - a valuable grounding for anyone new to the bullfights, and a valuable articulation for the aficionado of some of that hard-to- put-your-finger-on-it stuff that makes bu

News about danger

This is a riveting examination of suicidality and danger in both the toreros and the afficiandos. It was difficult not to consume the whole tour de force at one sitting: entertaining and distressing at the same time.

A modern look at an ancient spectacle

This book offers a refreshingly new slant on a subject that has been discussed at length by those who love and those who abhore the corrida de toros. At a time when animal rights enthusiasts would have us blush with shame over the systematic torture of an innocent animal, it takes courage and honest objectivity to bypass the emotional rhetoric in an effort to understand the history and the implications inherent in this unique dance of death. What can a contemporary Scottish woman in considerable physical and psychic pain tell us about this peculiarly Spanish drama? Surprisingly much. Kennedy covers a lot of ground very concisely and touches on artistic, moral, and philosophical implications that reverberate far beyond the immediate subject matter. Whether you have strong feelings for or against the ritual killing of bulls, you will find much that is thoughtprovoking in this cleardiscussion of the beauty and horror of bullfighting.

If you're looking for a "how-to" guide, this isn't your book

BUT if you are looking for an exploration of the role of bullfighting in Spanish culture, a concise historical overview, and a fairly nonjudgmental approach to the corrida, this is a great book! I thought the framing of the discussion in the author's own life circumstances DID NOT detract from the discussion...I think she needed to be at that place emotionally to be able to see the corrida's beauty and horror at the same time. I didn't find it distracting at all; she clearly did her homework, talked with lots and lots of people, and watched several different types of corridas. I think this book would be particularly good for those who want to see a corrida but feel somewhat horrified at the thought of possibly enjoying such a thing...and for those who (like me) HAVE seen one, and simultaneously loved and hated it.