Death In the Afternoon - Ernest Hemingway

Death in the Afternoon is Hemingway's book on bullfighting. If you have any interest in bullfighting, or in Hemingway's writing when he's genuinely invested in the topic, it's a great book. If neither of those categories applies to you, give it a pass.

I don't have any real interest in bullfighting myself. I'd enjoy it more if bulls which defeated the matador were allowed to live. The matador has an entire team with him, the bull is on its own. If the bull can triumph in spite of the odds, put it out to stud. Hemingway explains they were spared originally, though it was so they could be reused. The good news - from the bull's perspective - this works to its advantage*. Many matadors were dying, so Pope Pius the Fifth threatened excommunication to any princes that sponsored bullfighting, and barred those participating from Christian burials. The compromise was that bulls was not used more than once. Which somehow translated into killing them at the end, no matter what.

As usual, the Vatican ruins everything.

Anyway, despite having no interest in watching bullfighting, I was curious about it, and Death in the Afternoon comes through better than I could have expected. Hemingway covers everything, from the different stages of the fight itself, to the different types of passes, to the differences in bulls depending on breeds, the best places to sit depending on what experience you're after, where are the places to go at a given time of year for bullfights, the way bulls are chosen, the wheelin-dealin' that goes on when picadors choose their horses, and how a matador gets his specific bulls for a match. He discusses the role of the press in a matador's commercial success, how we deify the past, even if we hated it when it was happening, the conflict between the fans' desire for a show and the matador's desire to not die, which results in very different ideas of what the ideal bull is. He discusses the ways in which the techniques have changed, so that what is considered a "good" bullfight changes over time, and a matador can grow to be considered old-fashioned and unpopular before he knows it.

Given the scope of the book, the level of detail he reaches, is remarkable for less than 280 pages, and that's with a few pages at the end of each chapter typically devoted to other things. Odd little stories that have nothing to do with bullfighting. Critiques of critiques of his writing**. A brief discussion of the few times he's tried getting in the ring. When pressed whether he actually did that (by an old woman he conjured as a piece to address certain things), he claims there were hundreds of witnesses, though many have sadly died from damage to their diaphragm from excessive laughing (Hemingway wasn't nimble enough, though he was smart enough to recognize it and avoid being gored). Obviously I haven't read any other books on bullfighting to compare it with, but I feel as though I learned a lot from this, as he does it best to explain things clearly, trying to focus on one subject at a time and cover all he thinks he needs to before moving on.

I think the most important thing I learned from the book with regards to bullfighting was what he explained at the start of Chapter 2. Bullfighting is not a sport, in the sense that basketball or tennis are, where you have people competing to see who triumphs. Bullfighting is more like theater, because the bull's fate is largely preordained. It will fight well, use its strength, speed, and ferocity for all it's worth, but in the end it will die. It's like going to watch Hamlet. You know everyone will die, so it's a matter of how well the carry it off. The bullfight is the same. How well does the matador perform, how well does he bring out the bull's courage, highlight the danger he is placing himself in. Thinking about it that way doesn't make me a fan of bullfighting, but it helps me understand it better.

'He was a fine-looking boy who studied the violin until he was fourteen, studied bullfighting until he was seventeen, and fought bulls until he was twenty. They really worshiped him in Valencia and he was killed before they ever had time to turn on him.'

* The bulls are smarter than we might expect (depending on how smart you think bulls are), and they learn quickly enough the tricks of the cape. It's a matter of whether they can figure it out before they grow too tired to take advantage.

** He has a great line here I'd seen in one of his biographies about his writing: 'If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things he knows and the reader, the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.' I think Death in the Afternoon, though not prose is almost an exercise in this. He can't put down everything he knows, the book would be massive, and he'd never finish, since as he admits, he's always learning new things. So the goal is to describe enough the reader can understand what he's discussing and make some of the other connections on their own.