ON BULLFIGHTING A. L. Kennedy London: Yellow Jersey Press (a division of Random House) 1999 ISBN 0-224-05219-5 (UK edition) New York: Anchor Books (a division of Random House) 2001 ISBN 0-385-72081-5 (US edition) Don Hurley assisted Ms. Kennedy with the taurine detail in the manuscript.

Reviewed by Stanley Conrad
Webmeister, Mundo Taurino

Had I been more familiar with the UK literary scene, or been a more careful reader of the Times Literary Supplement or the New York Review of Books, I might not have been caught off-guard so by this introduction to the recently published A. L. Kennedy work, On Bullfighting:

"I'm thinking I might actually enjoy this, if I had more time.

It's Sunday, the first day of the week: the one that's for resting and possibly talking to God, but I am doing neither. I am sitting across my window ledge and thinking that Sundays are always much the same: vaguely peaceful and emptied and smug: and I am looking out over my gutter and four storeys down to my street. It's late in a mild afternoon and there are flickers of spring in the trees. The smell of young grass drifts up to me from the park and the air is also coloured very slightly with waking earth and sunny masonry. Cars beetle past, roofs gleaming, but there's no one out walking. Although I'd expect there might be on such a pleasant day, there is no one about.

Which means I should do this. I should jump now, while I can..."

But I've no literary pretentions. I had no way to know that Kennedy, no figura in the mundo taurino and only recently published in the USA (her novel, Original Bliss, was published in 1999; a second, So I Am Glad, was released in January 2000), can be counted on to deliver the unexpected in any bookish project, including an introductory look at bullfighting.

Born Alison Louise Kennedy, in Dundee, Scotland, the 35-year old writer burst upon the UK literary stage in the 1990s with a series of attention-grabbing novels, short story collections, and plays. Considered by some to be Scotland's (if not Britain's, or the English written word's) finest young novelist, Kennedy turned her sights to the mundo taurino in 1998, and has produced a work for which anyone concerned with the dearth of quality English-language taurine writing will be appreciative. Even some anti-taurinos may be impressed, those with a taste for the poetry that can be English-language prose.

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 bullfighting more than the sum of its beautiful and horrific parts.

On Bullfighting, originally released in the UK, was released in the USA on March 27, 2001 (by Random House/Anchor Books).

[originally posted on 21 February 2000; modified concerning minor publication details only, 2001 and 2006]

Additional published reviews

On bullfighting -- reviewed by Veronica Scrol -- Booklist, v. 97, no. 11, Feb.1, 2001

Taking the bull by the horns - and the camera -- reviewed by Frances Lannon -- Times Literary Supplement (TLS), Jan. 21, 2000, p. 10-11 --also reviews Death and Money in the Afternoon

On bullfighting -- The Economist, v. 353, no. 8144, Nov. 6, 1999

On bullfighting -- reviewed by Lorna Scott Fox -- London Review of Books, V. 22, no. 14, July 20, 2000