On the Shelf: Death and the Sun: A Matador’s Season in the Heart of Spain by Edward Lewine (Houghton Mifflin 2005)

For TC Style May/June 2006.

Edward Lewine’s almost-journalistic account of the tales and trials in the life of bullfighter Francisco Rivera

Death and the Sun is a detailed blow-by-blow account of a year in the life of Francisco Rivera Ordonez, a Spanish matador. “Fran,” as he is referred to in the book, has a tough act to follow: three generations of his family were great toreros, including his father, affectionately called Paquirri by the entire country. And the author Lewine also has some high expectations to meet. Hemingway is still one of the most popular and dedicated fans of bullfighting and the writing thereof, and right alongside him are Allen Josephs, Barnaby Conrad and Sidney Frumpkin, the rare American torero. Lewine has succeeded.

He opens by saying that this was not a work of fiction, but rather journalism, which prepares the reader for the plethora of terminology and detailed narrations of bullfighting that almost read like a manual. While Lewine was right to identify his work as journalism, the story of Fran, his upbringing, and his future make for a wonderful story that wouldn’t seem out of place if placed in The New York Times, which, coincidentally, is where the author had been a contributor.
The account of two very important corridas in Sevilla is a definite page-turner despite Fran’s bad luck of facing an unenthusiastic, defensive bull. Sentences and words are short and rapid to mimic the pace. But Lewine may not have been consistently successful at maintaining the difficult and delicate balance between the intricate history of Spain’s essential pastime and the story of the newest Ordonez torero. The trap of writing a book about what you adore and love is that you are tempted to saturate your audience with all there is to know about the subject, correcting almost every myth and injecting history and explanations at every turn. The question with Death and the Sun becomes, “Is this book about bullfighting with Francisco as an example, or is this a story about Francisco with many interjections?“

In a way, Lewine’s styling is much like the bullfights he so adores—in fact, the book is formally split into three thirds, like the fights. First there are a few trots about the ring with fascinating tidbits of information the reader may enjoy, like how toreador is never used, that it was from the opera Carmen, which was written by a Frenchman. Despite the popular belief, the first few stabs and piercing are not to aggravate the bull but rather to calm it and bring it down from the alarm of being surrounded and defenseless, and the musings on the setup, ceremony and traditions of the corrida and the bullfighting culture try to coax the reader into the setting, to learn more than just a red cape, a bull, and a fancy costume. The second round is where the picadors enter on horseback to pic the bull, to slow it down a bit more but still trying to keep its fighting spirit for when the matador, the torero, takes on the bull alone in the third segment. We see Fran build up to the height of the season by channeling his preoccupations and intimidations aside, overcoming them and surpassing others’ expectations just as a torero defers the bull’s charges to the picadors on their horses.

The greatest moment is not here, it is in the killing, in the third round. Matador, after all, means killer. The bull must die no matter what (which is why there is no betting on bullfights in Spain, even if they’ll gamble on poetry readings and drinking contests). There are a few great flourishes and moves, like the veronicas a torero performs with his cape and sword before a final killing stab to the bull. But the balance between story and sourcebook appears again, and so abruptly after Fran’s fight against a bull from the same breeder whose animal had killed his father Paquirri, on the anniversary of his father’s death do the epilogue and bibliography start. It is a good book on bullfighting on its own while also paying tribute to other writers on the subject, including the ever-popular Ernest Hemingway (there is a short chapter simply titled “Papa”). Have some sangria while you go through it.