Death in the Afternoon

Death in the Afternoon by Ernest Hemingway, 218 pages

Death in the Afternoon is Hemingway's book-length non-fiction essay on the art of Spanish bullfighting.  It is, Hemingway insists, an art rather than a sport, since it is by its nature an unequal contest with a foreordained conclusion.  The question is not whether the bull will die, but how, and the apparent contest is actually the tragic drama of the death of the bull.  In this drama, there are many characters, each of whom will be tested and proven in the arena.

The book is itself Hemingway's proof, an experiment in style that would shape his later writing, an attempt to find new ways to convert experience into prose.  As such, it has its successes and its failures.  The author's long imagined dialogue with an obliging older American woman wears out its welcome long before it is abandoned (a fact which Hemingway acknowledges in the text).  At the same time, there are passages which will make the sympathetic soul yearn to share in the romance of not-quite-modern Spain.  Doubtless, at times Hemingway's own vicarious desire for machismo colors his commentary and judgement.  He seems almost entirely blind, for example, to the obvious ways in which the bullfight symbolically reenacts the triumph of human reason over the brute power of nature.  Yet Hemingway is quite forthcoming about his own inadequacies in the arena, and his analysis of the toreros of the past and present is remarkable in its refusal to accept either the myth of progress or the myth of the golden age.

Death in the Afternoon is, perhaps, a better introduction to Hemingway than it is to bullfighting.  That's not necessarily a bad thing - most readers are probably more interested in the author than the subject anyway.