Gentle readers, this review is rated R for violent and ick-inducing discussion topics!

'Death in the Afternoon' by Ernest Hemingway is a complete dissertation on bullfighting. It covers every aspect: the bullfighters, the killing, the clothes, the instruments, the meaning of bullfighting rituals and words, and of course, the bulls and their upbringing. The edition I read had hundreds of blurry photos (I could not find the edition I checked out from the library on GR, so I selected the edition closest to it). The book also has a large glossary, which I found to be extremely helpful.

There is a section where EH included reactions from various people he had invited to come with him to a bullfight. He was not oblivious to how people were repulsed or hated it. Frankly, I went into this book expecting to be repulsed and disgusted. I love kitties and puppies, and I hate Chinese meat market methods, as well as American ones, and I want the whales and seals to be left alone. I'm a city kid. One of my parents grew up on a farm and the other on a primitive island, so I heard hunting and butchery stories, as well.

Ernest Hemingway was drawn to the sport of bullfighting by the ritual in killing bulls, I think, emphasize on 'ritual'. Ritual DOES lend some dignity and definitely a lot of control and ceremony. The last half of Chapter twelve in the book is a discussion with an old lady about EH's knowledge of dead, and rotting, soldiers killed, no rituals involved, on the battlefield: "A Natural History of the Dead." After a vivid and accurate and satiric rendition of wartime mules, injuries, mutilated soldiers, and tired doctors, EH ends the chapter with these words, "Madame, it is always a mistake to know an author."

Disturbing as death is to contemplate, even worse is how Humanity reacts to it when face to face with Death. I think ritualized death may be a way to make death less horrific and to make us vulnerable humans feel safer. Death is definitely the destiny of every man, woman and child. Have you ever seen a dead body? I have. Ever see a car wreck, a plane or train crash, a bombing attack, or a war battle? If you dare, most events are on video somewhere on the Internet, if you've never personally been involved. The random executions of innocent people make the ritualizing of it attractive (religion and video games are obvious offshoots). It feels like Death can be controlled, beautified, made emotionally acceptable through cultural sharing and distancing. Men can be shown as heroic, brave, talented and expert instead of as brutal uncontrolled butchers and victims of happenstance and chance.

Animals are unaware of the possibility of their Death; but humans know, and supposedly, humans should know better because we know...instead, if we aren't shoving it under the rug, we are moralizing and making philosophy on beautified imagery in obfuscated conversations. How inadequate this actually satisfies many people can be measured by how many young men volunteer for military service to find out: 1. What death is, and; 2. How they will react to it.

In my opinion, most women are fools in discussing actual death. Many women can provide a comforting bosom to cry on, but nothing substantial as far as 'getting it'. I've been part of female coffee klatches where I have heard the most inane, brain dead and clueless pap about Death.

People are all over the map in contemplation of Death, but despite the variety of reactions and thought, it is damn predictable on the surface. There are those who are 'been there, done that' and while they are not thinking alike on how they respond to their experience, we should give them the respect of knowledge which most of us do not have.

Death is often discussed by innocents who've never seen it, but who think they know enough about it to be knowledgeable - they are wrong. There is a definite 'before' and 'after' experience of death. Before seeing death, all is imagination and guesswork only; afterwords, surprising and weird emotions rise to the surface of consciousness which many hesitate to reveal.

Real Death has a way of smashing every cultural shaping of it. From my own personal experience, Death is both an individual and cultural event, and it changes you. One can share the cultural recognition of how you are changed; but only authors appear to have the courage to reveal the personal intellectual traumas. EH saw hundreds of bloated bodies in different stages of decomposition He drove mangled but still living soldiers to Hospital, and he saw mules and animals, innocent of course by nature, murdered and mauled. Bullfighting must have been a relief and a safe way to experience the 'rush' of death.

I can reveal one of near-Death's effects is that of a HUGE, overwhelming 'rush'. In one of my experiences, I was walking around during night where there were no lights. Suddenly out of the blackness a big heavy train was speeding by 6 inches from my nose. I hadn't heard it or known it was coming. I didn't know I was near train tracks. It must have been going 60 miles per hour as it was a blur, and a wind sucking at my clothes and hair. Instead of fear, I felt an elation beyond description, a huge excitement at having almost been killed but having been lucky to not have taken that extra step onto the tracks a moment before. Instead, I had paused, noticing the crickets had gone silent.

https://youtu.be/B17vGoOWI5A

The above link should lead you to a YouTube video showing a bull fight. I watched this with renewed interest, sparked by Ernest Hemingway's book 'Death in the Afternoon'. While I still think it is barbaric, I no longer think it is obscene.


Ok, WARNING WARNING WARNING! The link below is to a truly obscene video, full of animal cruelty. WARNInG! This video is truly horrific, but it is not the worst I've seen. Seriously. This YouTube video is a look at the first steps about making hamburger - getting old and sick cows to rendering plants. There are other videos which I could not watch beyond a few seconds. Lots and lots of videos exist of living cows being tortured at rendering plants everywhere on the internet. There are also videos of cows in Europe being horribly abused in transport - ship, truck, etc. - on being pushed off or on ships, trucks.

http://youtu.be/CrxvxewC-gA


The bullfight kills the Bos primigenius species with some dignity. It appears we kill our meat with cruel depravity and sneering laughter. I now find the moralizing over bullfights disingenuous.


The link below is everything about cattle you ever wanted to know.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle


I changed my opinion about bullfighting after doing some thinking and research. Yes, it's a gratuitous and unnecessary display of animal death - but it is a surprisingly respectful killing. I'm sure many of the spectators are not completely aware of the meanings meant by the rituals (how many of us utilize the internet or non-fiction books to research topics regularly - religious Americans, for example, in tests about Christianity, average a score at 30% knowledgeable about their own faith). But in my opinion, given how brutal many deaths are, how sanctimonious we are about some deaths and yet we completely tolerate or look the other way on other unjust or horrific deaths, and the fact most cattle end up dead before we eat them as steaks and hamburger, I've decided I'm ok with bullfighting, if not the obscene avidity of fans. I watched the YouTube videos, and IMHO, given current butchery methods in regular cattle-killing factories (also see the videos of how developed nations kill pigs, chickens, rabbits, etc., bullfighting is low on the scale of animal cruelty.

Most cattle are destined for butchery. Most cattle die in undignified and drawn-out painful deaths, cruel and unnecessary. In comparison, bullfighting seems to me to allow some cattle more dignity, exploitive or not. I don't know if there are educational classes available to bullfighting aficionados so that it isn't only about sick emotional satisfaction, but the rituals, if adhered to, guarantee a respectful dance of death between the matador and the bull. EH gives a clear, reasoned description of the emotional reasons for bullfighting and also makes clear the intellectualized rituals which elevate this particular blood sport beyond, say, deer hunting or wild horse round-ups, or wolf/wild animal-by-helicopter killing or tying down a tiger to a stake so the 'brave' hunter can walk up to it and put a bullet in its body (not the head -that's needed for hanging on the wall).

Still, I'll never ever go see a bullfight for real. City kid, me. I can trap rats and step on insects and bury household pets, but not without squeamishness.

P.s. Hemingway also displays his usual bigoted inner voice, i.e, homophobic and woman hating.

Unsurprisingly, Hemingway was very interested in and knowledgeable about bullfighting. This is a great treatise on all aspects of these ‘cultural events’, as the Spanish have it. To me it seems more like the practice of a highly uneven and barbaric contest. I only read this book because I am a great admirer of Hemingway as a writer. My rating purely reflects my attitude to the topic of the book, which is extremely well written, as well as informative and interesting, like all of Hemingway’s work.

Vintage Hemingway in which he explores the history, pageantry, art, and culture of bullfighting. He includes information of several matadors and discusses some of the brutality of the sport. It does give a foundation for understanding the event.

I would read this whenever I had some red wine or chorizo handy, hence why it took nearly a year to finish. There are some great meditations on the art of bullfighting here but as you’d expect it’s so mired in anachronistic histories and technique that it really isn’t worth the bother of reading the whole way through. Hemingway even seems to realise how tedious the work is by shoving in a contrived dialogue with an old lady and speaking about Faulkner and how to write at some points. I read this book the way you’d hate fuck an ex girlfriend, fuck you Hemingway.

"Wine is one of the most civilized things in the world and one of the natural things of the world that has been brought to the greatest perfection, and it offers a greater range for enjoyment and appreciation than, possibly, any other purely sensory thing which may be purchased. One can learn about wines and pursue the education of ones palate with great enjoyment all of a lifetime, the palate becoming more educated and capable of appreciation and you having constantly increasing enjoyment and appreciation of wine even though the kidneys may weaken, the big toe become painful, the finger joints stiffen, until finally, just when you love it the most you are finally forbidden wine entirely."

What an odd piece of literature. Hemingway's labour of love dives deeply into the sport of bullfighting. Part history, part travelogue, part guide, and strangely, part narrative. The recurring character of the old woman is particularly interesting. She often gave voice to my thoughts, critiquing the writer for a boring chapter with no dialogue. I don't know what she, or I, were expecting. The book is, after all, non-fiction. Hemingway's genius does shine through, and the best parts of this book come in his musings about food, drink, writing, and life in general.

Long ago and far away I'd idle around the second-hand book sales that were held in our Student Union. The booksellers were a distinctive collection of late middle-aged men to whom normative styles of housekeeping and hygiene were alien. I could imagine them travelling from one university to another all week, setting out lines of not always mouldy paperbacks on trestle tables, making a thin living selling and reselling course books as well as books not on any reading list imaginable. Occasionally I pick up something for a pound or two and one of those books was this one.

It is to date the only Hemingway I've ever read. It's a book about Bullfighting - a bit of a cruel misnomer seeing as the purpose of the exercise is to kill the bull in a ritualistic manner but I suppose Bull Sacrificing doesn't have quite the same ring to it - but some personal recollections were mingled into stories about bullfighter, the fights and the training. This is mainly with reference to Spain in the 1920s and 30s with a few mentions of the Bullfighting scene in Mexico.

Ferdinand was one of my favourite books as a child, so I can't imagine ever watching a bull-fight but I was pleasantly surprised how interesting it was to read the details of how matadors train and learn their technique from mock fighting with cows (training with bulls would not be the wisest pastime, cattle are dangerous enough out in the fields as it is), to the set up of the ring and how the event is structured to ensure the death of the bull.

There is no interest though in the whys of bull fighting, why this sacrificial event developed in Iberia and why not elsewhere, particularly considering that over the border in Southern France they have their own different bull sport tradition that doesn't involve the death of the beast as a matter of course. What was really weird were the couple of completely irreverent anecdotes about homosexuals, one Hemingway describing hearing two Americans in the neighbouring hotel room in Paris one realising that the other's intentions were not platonic and with the connivance of the hotel management inescapable, another in which Hemingway as Art Critic telling an allegedly impressed woman that all the male figures in El Greco paintings were clearly gay. When somebody seems to be seeing gays under every bed you can't help remembering the Lady doth protest too much, methinks and suspect there is more than a splash of projection going on.

Probably of historic interest only, unless you are a completionist, but deals with an oddly interesting topic.

Not as good as “The Story of Ferdinand.”

Hemingway's classic treatise on Spanish bullfighting.

After reading, my son asked about the book and it's barbaric subject. He and I watched some bull fights on Youtube and he said, "WHAT??? They actually kill the bulls?"

In this age of PETA and Michael Vick it was strange to read. This 80 year old glimpse into Old World savagery was not Hemingway's greatest work, but it demonstrated his technical skill and mastery of the language.

It was a good book, the reading of it was very fine.

3.5 Before I took this book off of my bookshelf, I will admittedly confess that I knew nothing of bullfights, bullfighting rings, bullfighters (and their "teams") or fighting bulls. I imagine that this book is probably as a complete an education on those topics as anything else available in print.

The first third of the book feels a bit chaotic as he is trying to explain so many details (of which there are many) about the subjects mentioned above that it he seems to be writing in circles. But has it continues, it becomes more organized and in each of the future chapters, these topics are distinctly separated and described and made much, much clearer.

It does have some photos and a handy glossary in the back of the Spanish words used in bullfighting that helped to get me through this first portion of the text.

He does divert a few times, wandering from the main topic, recollecting his days as a stretcher bearer in Italy during WWI (although he uses his experience from the war as it relates to death which is the main theme throughout the book). He also has a couple tangents, writing about modern literature and Spanish painters. And because this is a work of nonfiction and he cannot insert dialogue of his own, he invents a character, an old woman, with whom he has a few conversations with about various topics, some which do not have anything to do with bullfighting. I found this to be somewhat amusing. At one point he gets into an argument with this old lady. She doesn't last long and eventually disappears from the book altogether.

There is a portion of this book that I found quite boring because it is completely irrelevant to the present day in which he discusses current bullfighters and newcomers and he speculates on their futures in the "sport."

Finally in the last third of the text, he seems to settle down and it is much easier to follow but that might due to the thorough education the reader receives during the first two thirds of the book.

The last chapter is more the typical Hemingway and what one would expect of his writing. He summarizes for the reader all of the things he left out: the various countryside and cities and what it is like traveling to and from those places and spending time there, the people one might meet and the conversations they might have, all the sights, sounds and smells that Mr. Hemingway is so versed at. I think if he had more time to write this book and able to include those things, this work of nonfiction would have been much better and he all but admits that in the very beginning and at the very end.

He finishes off with a great line. “The great thing is to last and get your work done and see and hear and learn and understand; and write when there is something you know; and not before; and not too damned much after.”
I think he truly lived that philosophy his entire life career.

Word of warning: This is a book about DEATH and if a reader does not want to read about death of any type (human or animal) I would recommend to leave this one off your list.

Death in the Afternoon, Ernest Hemingway
Death in the Afternoon is a non-fiction book written by Ernest Hemingway about the ceremony and traditions of Spanish bullfighting, published in 1932. The book provides a look at the history and what Hemingway considers the magnificence of bullfighting. It also contains a deeper contemplation on the nature of fear and courage. While essentially a guide book, there are three main sections: Hemingway's work, pictures, and a glossary of terms. In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway explores the metaphysics of bullfighting—the ritualized, almost religious practice—that he considered analogous to the writer's search for meaning and the essence of life. In bullfighting, he found the elemental nature of life and death.
Notes: Hemingway 2003: p. 12, "It would be pleasant of course for those who do like it if those who do not would not feel that they had to go to war against it or give money to try to suppress it, since it offends them or does not please them, but that is too much to expect and anything capable of arousing passion in its favor will surely raise as much passion against it."
عنوانها: مرگ در بعد از ظهر؛ من فقط از این خانه نگهداری میکنم؛ نویسنده: ارنست همینگوی؛ تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز سی و یکم ماه می سال 2016 میلادی
عنوان: مرگ در بعد از ظهر؛ نویسنده: ارنست همینگوی؛ مترجم: سحر محمدبیگی؛ تهران، آرادمان؛ 1394؛ در 287 ص؛ شابک: 9786008099086؛ موضوع: داستانهای نویسندگان امریکایی - سده 20 م
عنوان: من فقط از این خانه نگهداری میکنم؛ نویسنده: ارنست همینگوی؛ مترجم: سمانه نیک سرشت؛ تهران، انتشارات فراموشی؛ 1396؛ در 176 ص؛ شابک: 9786009746613؛
کتاب «مرگ در بعد از ظهر»؛ در سال 1932 میلادی نگاشته شده، و یک کار «غیرداستانی» درباره ی «گاوبازی اسپانیایی» است. «همینگوی» در باره ی گاوبازی: «تورئو»، در بیان درست یا نادرست بودن آن، چنین نگاشته‌ است: «تنها این را می‌دانم که کارخوب، کاری است که پس از انجام آن احساس خوبی از خود داشته‌ باشی، و کار بد آن است که پس از انجامش، احساس بدی به‌ شما دست بدهد». ا. شربیانی

Winter 2020
College reads (I can't believe I had to read a passionate text about bullfighting. F*ing college, amirite? I've hated touradas since I was a child, they are an example of traditions that should end, that not all rituals are worthwhile or positive)

This is a work of non-fiction,which is all about Hemingway's obsession with bullfighting and he goes into considerable detail about its various aspects.

For me,personally,it was a difficult book to read as I consider bullfighting something very cruel.The sight of death to please the crowd ! I skimmed through the book.

Hemingway goes into a lot of technicalities of what the bullfighter needs to do.At times he refers to him bluntly as "the killer" and a great killer must love death.Bullfighting in Hemingway's view can only go on in a country which loves death.

He is disappointed that there are few killers in his day who can kill cleanly and can be called great.He talks about the famous bullfighters of the day including some who died.

Hemingway is not too concerned with what happens to the bull or the bullfighter,but he seems much more concerned about the horses used in bullfights which could get killed by the bull.

During that era,the bullfighters even had to travel from one bullfight to the next by road.And even before they could rest properly,had to fight again !

Then he offers advice on when to go to Spain to watch a bullfight and what to drink.He even talks about Spanish whores whom he doesn't find beautiful.

There is plenty more but I couldn't read each and every word of this book.Maybe it's great for afficionados of bullfighting,but I'm not of them.Hence the two star rating.

Reading it,I was reminded of a movie on bullfighting I watched some years ago.Titled Blood and Sand,it captures the cruelty and senselessness of bullfighting really well.A skilled matador,after defeating several bulls,meets his own sad end while still very young.