On Bullfighting (Yellow Jersey Shorts) - Softcover

Kennedy, A.L.

3.59

257 ratings by Goodreads

9780224060998: On Bullfighting (Yellow Jersey Shorts)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0224060996 ISBN 13: 9780224060998

Publisher: Yellow Jersey, 2000

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

Bullfighting - the ultimate spectator sport.

Acclaimed novelist A. L. Kennedy unpeels the layers and explains the mechanics before dissecting them with surgical precision. Beyond the theatre, the costume and the well-worn plot she focuses on the fact that a man faces his death while a crowd looks on. The result is a startling confrontation with her own, and mankind's, mortality.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Review:

Following the publication of her novel Everything You Need, writer AL Kennedy found herself suffering from an acute inability to produce prose fiction. This, coupled with a general unhappiness and the fact that she was "literally boring" herself "to death" led Kennedy to contemplate suicide. Saved by the banal strains of a "pseudo-Celtic pap" song she hears as she is about to jump from the open window of her flat, Kennedy, who refuses to die without a "rag of credibility", resumes life and sets about the book that she has been commissioned to write: a non-fiction study of bullfighting, a study of "people who risk death for a living".

Immersing herself in the arid heat of Spain and the lore and lure of the corrida, Kennedy travels to the heartlands of bullfighting--Madrid, Seville and Granada, in order to dissect the spectacle of ritual death and go beyond her received assumptions of this most graphic of public sports. She discovers that the culture of the toreros permeates Spain, that the "golden age" of bullfighting of the 1930s has been resurrected by new young hopefuls in the 1990s, that the nauseating, fascinating machinations of the corrida are played out as entertainment on afternoon television, and fancies that the tears of Seville's famous statue of the Macarena flow for the doomed matadors. The perfect antidote to macho posturing, On Bullfighting is an intelligent, many-layered account of one of the most mysterious and controversial rituals still practised daily in Europe. An impartial observer and thorough researcher, Kennedy takes us through the tense moments of the corrida as she witnesses it: mediocre, undignified and cruel by turns and yet also almost "a religious experience, the sight of a man willing in, taking in, an animal's life. It is a strange thing to watch: an elaborately prepared transgression, a sacrifice and a sin, ugly and peculiarly moving". --Catherine Taylor

Review:

"One of the best books of the year" (Jeanette Winterson)

"On Bullfighting casts an unofficial eye over a world of male exploit; the public spectacles are treated with a fresh particularity, the inner landscapes of pain with an ardent, high-risk honesty" (Julain Barnes)

"Informative, minutely observed and beautifully written" (Independent)

"An ecclectic and fascinating cultural history" (Observer)

"A strange and beautiful book" (Michael Ignatieff)

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.