Actual rating 3.4

As far as non-fiction writing goes, this is probably the best piece I’ve read so far. I’ve still got a ton of Jane Didion to read, but this is going to take some beating.

Hemmingway takes you through (what I imagine) is every nook and cranny there is to do with bullfighting. Coming into this with basically no knowledge of the ‘sport’, and a pretty disfavour-able opinion on it, I feel like I could hold my own in most conversations now. I still don’t agree with bullfighting personally, but I have a much better understanding of why so many are so passionate about it.

A fascinating, if not a little bit lengthy of a read.

http://andalittlewine.blogspot.com/2012/01/book-1-of-52-death-in-afternoon.html

I didn't really have any expectations when Carol brought me Ernest Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon as an unabridged audiobook from the library. I love Hemingway: the terseness that, in Death... sometimes approaches self caricature; the depth of thought and conviction beneath the simplicity of the story; the richly textured world his characters inhabit.

I never realized that I love Hemingway's sense of humor. It may be that, in his other works I've read, the humor is overshadowed by his seriousness, by the great man trying to be great. I was prepared for Death... to be a book about bullfighting, but it's really a self- and critic-mocking books about life and performance, and where the two coincide to create art.

The highlight of the book for me revolves around the "old woman," a character that Hemingway creates in the midst of this 'non-fiction' book to stand in place of the bullfighting amateur to whom he may impart his wisdom on bulls, bullfights and bullfighters (and the various venereal disease to which they are prone). At her insistence, he weaves into his book on bullfighting, stories, digressions on art and literature (and the flaws of its critics), and his views on courage.

The most important lesson for us to take from the bullfight is the pride of the matador. A matador deserves to be applauded if he performs all parts of the bullfight honestly and to the best of his ability; we should not hold it against a matador if he is too fat to face the bull in a stately manner, nor if he is too slow of foot to make brilliant passes with the muleta. If he tries truly and passionately and sincerely then what he has done will always be "very fine."

And that is precisely what Hemingway has given us: a very fine book; a nonfiction that is equal parts American essay in the tradition of Emerson and Thoreau and travel writing; a meta(non?)fiction that deconstructs our criticism of its flaws even as they form; a novel through digression that presages works like Nabokov's Pale Fire. It's been quite a while since I enjoyed a book this much.

Oh boy, I've read some good novels by this guy, but not this one... Definitely not for those who believe in animal rights and express compassion towards suffering of fellow earthlings.
This book could've been less boring, but the main body of it is just a dull discussion of how a bull can be slaughtered in front of a narrow-minded audience. Maybe it was sensational in its own time, but in the 21st century it is as outdated and out of place as ideas about racial superiority, eugenics and other nonsense that would rather stay buried in the history.
One page provided interesting discussion of why bullfights were not hyped in Catalonia and Galicia, and if this book had more similar stuff, maybe it wouldn't be just a worthless outdated crap.

I've read this book multiple times since I first encountered it in high school - I believe this is the fourth time, though I've not consciously kept count. I first read it, back in high school in the 70s, because I'd discovered Ernest Hemingway and found that I loved his writing (I've learned since that he could produce junk, too). But I've reread it periodically because the subject is interesting too.

Now before all the animal rights people come screeching for my head (amazing how those who want to protect animals from harm have no compunction about harming people - sometimes with hurtful words, and sometimes with guns or knives or saline solution or vacuums...yet, those who want to save the whales also want desperately to kill the babies), I have never seen a corrida de toros, literally "running of the bulls," what we call a bullfight. I'll mention here, as a parenthesis in this parenthetical paragraph, that what everyone calls "the running of the bulls" in Pamplona is actually the encierro the enclosing of the bulls in their pens prior to the corrida. It's true that they run through the streets - but the real "running" of the bulls takes place later, in the bull ring. Anyway, back to my point here - I've never seen a bullfight. I've never been in any country, never mind any town, that had a bullring (in Spanish, una plaza de toros). I don't approve of cruelty to animals, and I have no use for any hunting for a purpose other than getting food. I don't say that I like bullfights (how can I like or dislike any spectacle I've never witnessed? I can, abstractly, dislike what the thing does, but I can't judge the thing itself until I've witnessed it).

With that in mind, I say that again that the subject of this book interests me. I wouldn't have the guts to stay in the ring with the bull, unless I was on one side, he was on the other, he was blind, he was deaf, and he was looking the other way. Those who protest against bullfights do not, I think, properly understand what sort of animal a fighting bull is. This is, essentially, a wild animal. There is the absolute minimum of contact with human beings until the bull enters the ring, partly to prevent him learning so much that he is impossible to dominate and will certainly kill the matador, and partly because if you separate one of these bulls from the herd, he'll charge just about anything. In a group they're manageable - but let one get loose, and he'll attack cars, houses, horses...people... In the ring, the bull outweighs the man by as much as 100 times, and while the man has a sword, the bull has two "swords," the horns which he uses as precisely as we can touch something with our fingers. Although modern medicine makes it much less common than it used to be, matadors still occasionally die in the ring, or later from what the bulls do to them. The man has to dominate, control, and finally kill an animal with superior size, speed, strength, and armament. Leaving aside, for the sake of discussion, the question of cruelty to the bull, it is an uneven contest, and the only thing that makes it possible for the matador to survive is his mind. He knows bulls exhaustively, while the bull has limited knowledge of men, and he knows how to use his knowledge of bulls, and of the tools of his trade, to control what otherwise would tear him to bleeding shreds. And this unequal contest - all the physical attributes on the side of the bull, and all the intelligence on the side of the man - is fascinating to read about.

Hemingway takes the position that bullfighting isn't a sport, but a spectacle, a tragedy, an art form. The point of it isn't just to kill the bull - any slaughterhouse could do that - but to kill the bull following a set of ceremonial forms, using specific tools, in a particular manner. If all that bullfighting involved was killing bulls, anyone off the street could walk in, take up an automatic weapon, and accomplish the task. But while the death of the bull is the final act of the corrida, it's not the point of the exercise. The point is what comes between the time the bull rushes into the ring, and the moment when the bull is dead. And that means that, however repugnant the effects on the bull may be, bullfighting isn't wanton slaughter, and it's not casual cruelty. I'm at a loss to find any term which accurately describes the affair, except for those which Hemingway used - art and spectacle.

So much for the subject of the book. The writing is Hemingway's, which no one has successfully imitated (more than anyone else, Hemingway proved that an imitation of great writing, no matter how skillful the imitation, is still just a fake). It's not his best writing, except in the last chapter when he writes about the Spain that he loved. His device of the Old Lady is clumsy and unnecessary, and I wish his editor had told him to cut those passages. And I suspect that Hemingway was harder on some of the matadors he discusses than the facts warranted, and easier on others, just as his favoritism toward Antonio Ordóñez marred his later bullfighting book, The Dangerous Summer. But as long as his writing is at least mediocre for him, Hemingway's writing poor writing is better than the best writing of a lot of modern authors. This isn't the best writing Hemingway produced - that occurs in some of his short stories (e.g. "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," "In Another Country"), in the opening passage of Islands In the Stream when he's describing the house on Bimini, the first few chapters of A Moveable Feast, and his best novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls. But this is still good writing where it's best, and no worse than mediocre at its lowest moments. If you're opposed to bullfighting, but are willing to approach this book on its own merits, leaving emotional reactions to the corrida itself behind, you very well might enjoy this book. And if you have no objections to the corrida, you'll find it even easier to enjoy.

This book can’t be rushed—even by the true bullfighting aficionado. Hemingway does an earnest job of describing every aspect of bullfighting to a fault. So much so that it loses some of the... romance... of the duel itself. It was a book that forced me to read excerpts at a time to avoid an overload of information. The intent was obviously present, and the prose flow; the sheer amount of information will cause you to reach for a bottle of Tylenol.

An epic tome on the art and grandeur of Spanish bullfighting from one of America's greatest aficionados, Ernest Hemingway, who explicates the craft and spiritual intensity of this ancient European ritual through terse, journalistic, prose and rigorous scholarship. Not surprisingly, Hemingway is not terribly perturbed by the grotesque barbarity of the violence of bullfighting; Hemingway was an enthusiast of hunting and had little to no moral qualms about killing animals (and sometimes people). Yet he is not totally insensitive, warning the reader that most spectators of bullfighting are normally disgusted by the killing of the horses more than anything else.

For Hemingway, the bullfight is not meant to be understood as an equal battle between man and beast. Rather, it is a tragedy, and the tragedy is for the bull who ought to be killed. He writes, "The best of all fighting bulls have a quality, called nobility by the Spanish, which is the most extraordinary part of the whole business" (113), yet Hemingway does not provide any comment on the utter absurdity of the whole business. Hemingway was a writer obsessed with, and in search of true courage in the face of natural danger and fate, and he found it most explicitly in war and in bullfighting.

However, some readers will be surprised to find that `Death in the Afternoon,' is not simply about bullfighting. Hemingway also expounds quite at length about his views on art and the craft of writing. He says: "When writing a novel, a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature" (191). Unfortunately, Hem was never fully successful at creating a living woman, but every writer has a weakness. "A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl" (192).

Also included in this altogether excellent volume is a collection of stunning photographs depicting various stages of the bullfight and various matadors of fame; there are also fascinating portraits of the running of the bulls in Pamplona (echoing those fabulous sequences in `The Sun also Rises'). Additionally, Hemingway has provided the reader with a detailed glossary of important bullfighting terms for true aficionados. Originally published through Scribner in 1932

Para quien desconozca todo acerca de la tauromaquia, esta crónica resulta indispensable. La minuciosidad y rigurosidad del autor ayudan muchísimo a entender la tauromaquia y el por qué es un arte en Iberoamérica. Algunos párrafos, al final de la obra, dedicados a describir la mentalidad colectiva de los castellanos, gallegos, madrileños y catalanes constituye unas muy interesantes opiniones del autor. Merecen ser tomadas en cuenta y confrontarlas con la actualidad. Al menos, en el caso de Castilla, diría que después de un siglo, las cosas no cambian en la meseta central.

lo doy por acabado porque no puedo más. es de las cosas más aburridas que he leído nunca y no le doy menos porque no se le puede dar menos. al principio presenta algunas ideas interesantes pero todo lo demás es misoginia y palabrería.

Whatever one's views on bullfighting—even the author himself admitted that it was more tragedy than sport—this book must be considered preeminent in its field. If I had to reduce my Hemingway collection to one, this is the book I'd keep. It's a reference work (complete with glossary) that reads like a novel, and there's even ninety-plus pages of black-and-white photographs at the end that tell a stark and unflinchingly realistic tale all their own.

Hemingway's reason for writing the book was as clear and simple as his writing:

"I was trying to write then...and I found the greatest difficulty...was to put down what really happened. The only place where you could see life and (violent) death now that the wars were over [the book, published in 1932, covers the decade of the 1920s] was in the bull ring. I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest and most fundamental is violent death."

"...to put down what really happened." This Hemingway does, and does brilliantly. Although he himself became an unabashed aficionado of the bullfights, he makes no attempt to glorify the practice and tells "what really happened" right down the line. Along the way, we learn all there is to know about the corrida: about the greats as well as the cowards; about how the bulls are selected; about how the fight itself is played out in three stages, or tercios; about technique. There is even advice for the first-time fan on where to sit, depending on what one wishes to watch for in particular. (Bring binoculars if you have them, but remember that it's impolite to focus them on anyone who's not sitting in one of the boxes—the girls in those seats consider being looked at a compliment!)

This book is not for the squeamish. It contains graphic descriptions of gorings, up to and including the more-than-occasional disemboweling of the spavined horses ridden by the picadors. (In one passage, Hemingway explains to a mythical Old Lady that the sawdust she saw coming out of one of the horses after a goring had been put there by a veterinarian to fill the void left by whatever missing organ the unfortunate animal had lost in a previous fight. Grim stuff.)

Death in the Afternoon is a classic, and well worth your time if you're at all interested in Hemingway and/or bullfighting. The only knock I can put on this book (this edition, at least) is the absence of an index; but that's not enough to keep me from giving it maximum points.

Not as good as “The Story of Ferdinand.”

Why is this pamphlet about bullfighting the longest work in his entire oeuvre? And why is it still kinda great, and essential in understanding his obsessions, his machismo, his madness, and his method?

این کتاب یه حالت گزارش مانند داره از مسابقات گاو بازی. در نظر اول شاید خیلی جذاب به نظر نیاد مثلا توی کتاب از جاهای خوب برای نشستن توی محل برگزاری مسابقه گفته میشه تا معروف ترین و بهترین ماتادور ها و همینطور بهترین ها در بد بودن حتی انگار موقع خوندن کتاب هم خیلی متن جذابی رو انگار شاهد نیستیم و میشه گفت تا حدود زیادی هم کتاب دردناکیه. من خودم هیچوقت نتونستم گاو بازی رو درک کنم و همیشه ازش متنفر بودم ولی چیزهایی که توی این کتاب خوندم یه ذره شاید دیدگاهمو عوض کرد. اساسا همینگوی میگه که گاو بازی یه مسابقه نیست و ماتادور اگه ماتادور خیلی خوبی باشه هنرمند به حساب میاد (که توی کتاب به شکل مفصل ماتادور خوب و بد رو تعریف می کنه). و گاوبازی در اصل تراژدی مرگ گاوه. چیزی که خودم میتونم تشبیه کنم این هست که بیشتر مثل دیدن یه تئاتر میمونه که اگه بازیگرای خوبی (گاو شجاع و ماتادور شجاع) داشته باشه فوق العاده است دیدنش چون محتوای به شدت جالبی (مرگ) داره. همینطور جالبه که بدونید گاو توی گاوبازی هیچوقت زنده نمیمونه و اگر تو زمین ماتادور نتونه اون رو بکشه بیرون از زمین قطعا کشته میشه چون هر گاو فقط یک بار باید توی این رویداد شرکت کنه چون گاو ها موجودات احمقی نیستن و کاملا از مسابقه ی که ازش زنده خارج بشن تجربه کسب می کنن. همینطور کشتن گاو با شمشیر حالت شرافتمندانه اش این هست که وقتی گاو حمله می کنه به سمت ماتادور, ماتادور باید شمشیر رو از بین شاخ های گاو به پشتش بزنه و خودش رو در ریسک آسیب شدید و مرگ قرار بده و بتونه گاو رو از کنارش با فاصله خیلی کم رد کنه.
در کل خیلی کتاب خوب و جالبی بود برای من و به نظرم با اینکه متن خیلی ساده است اما انگار مفهوم خیلی فراتر از فقط آشنایی با گاوبازی هست. خودم از وقتی که شروع کردم به خوندن کتاب تا الان که دارم دربارش مینویسم کاملا ذهنم رو درگیر کرده و نمی تونم بهش فکر نکنم و بعیده به این زودی ها هم از ذهن خارج بشه.