Customer Reviews

The Dangerous Summer

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Considered literary non-fiction, this is the account of the 1959
season of bullfighting in Spain and the intense competition between
two competing matadors for the glory of that season. It is his last
major work at age 60; he killed himself the following year.

In an
introduction by James Mitchner, it is explained that this piece was
commissioned by Life Magazine. The assignment was for Hemmingway to
revisit the bullfights he had written about in his classic novel
"Death in the Afternoon" published in 1940. Hemingway was
supposed to write 10,000 words for the article. Instead, he submitted
120,000 words. It was edited down to 70,000 words and ran in three
installments.

This book I read, however, was only about 45,000 words
and focuses specifically on the particular contests between two
competing matadors who happened to be brothers in law. Hemingway had
a personal relationship with both of them and brings the reader to the
dinners and the parties as well as to the infirmary after a goring,
the painful healing process in Spanish hospitals that do not
administer painkillers, the long rides on bad roads between bullfights
and the dirt and heat and fatigue and glory.

I have not read much of
Hemingway and knew nothing at all about bullfighting when I started
reading. Yet, by the end of the book a portrait of the author emerges
as well as an understanding of the history, tradition choreographed
performance of skill that occurs in the bull ring. Somehow, I was
able to move beyond my personal feelings about the slaughter of the
bull, and get into the mindset of Hemingway and the people of Spain,
where bullfighting is a national passion.

It has to do with courage.
And it has to do with facing death.

Hemmingway said it all it better
than I ever could:

"This was Antonio's regular appointment with
death that we had to face every day. Any man can face death but to be
committed to bring it as close as possible while performing certain
classic movements and do this again and again and again and then deal
it out yourself with a sword to an animal weighing half a ton which
you love is more complicated than facing death."

I should have read this chronicle of bullfighting before my college semester spent in Madrid. I did not read it and instead, I sat in the bleachers of the arena completely disgusted, wishing for the first time in my life that I was at an American football game instead. I was so ignorant that I almost felt tempted to run down and let the pathetic black creature loose, like some rebel animal rights person in a research lab. Back then, I did not understand the history, tradition, glory and sentimentality that belongs to bullfighting. I was ignorant and should not have gone to the bullfight without reading this chronicle by Hemingway first. Now, I some day plan to return and to watch another bullfight. I know now I will see a completely different sport; and not really a sport but a performance. I once thought bullfighting was a battle between man and beast. After reading The Dangerous Summer I know it is a choreographed performance of skill, wisdom, experience and bravery. I urge anyone who plans to go to a bullfight, to read this first. Do not judge this Spanish tradition until you first understand what it is about.

Have you ever pulled a big, bitter pickle fron a barrel and enjoyed it? Munched fresh garlic gloves and savored them despite the pain? Downed Bloody Marys with 3 times the ordinary dose of pepper, and with tabasco sauce thrown in? If you said yes to all 3, chances are you will greatly enjoy this book.

By the end of his life, it is now clear, Hemingway had developed a loose, jocund, even cheery reportorial writing style as a sort of second mode. He first really loosened up his sentences and paragraphs in this manner in the major novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, then went back to tautness (modified) in Across the River, Old Man and the Sea (straight old stuff), and The Moveable Feast (new high marks in the original style). But this, like the recently published Under Kilamanjaro, is a development of the second mode. Way too many scholarly bios and criticism, early after EH's death and to date, have just called the later writing a slackening and a self-charicature, as if the most careful writer of modern English took a 15 year vacation. A lot of this kind of talk was and remains resentment, of course, against the stature of the writing and the man's public clowning. But to come to this close to final product with such misconceptions is a big mistake.

EH once personified Nostalgia as a beautiful woman, and if the opener here doesn't move you -- EH returning to his beloved Spain after years away -- you ought to check your birth record and be sure you were born on this good earth. After the drive in, EH seemingly opens up the second relaxed mode big time, fun and adventures on the road chasing down a mano a mano between the 2 biggest bullfight rivals of the day. There are gags and funny business and personal trivia, even, that the earlier writer avoided, for sure, but boy, don't get suckered into those traps. The old man with the pen is menacing as ever, and in a whole new way. Just when you're set up like a bowling pin he takes you with a sucker punch -- an absolutely deadpan observation about Dominquin's statue of himself in his own house, the way a spooky wind rises at dusk in a vagrant bullring, spelling menace. The jolts are as real, however different, from what hits you in In Our Time. And they have a heavy gravity and patina of sadness that only an old fellow can deliver. Indeed, the effects can be quite emotionally draining in their potent truth.

The estate kept putting out these edited versions, buying the scholars' line, poor Miss Mary not wanting to impair "the reputation." Well, ladies and gentlemen, its intact. Dear Scribners or whoever you are now, please publish the whole ball of wax or let Kent State do it, the long manuscript that EH told his friends was after "Proustian effects." This book, a calculated risk to "the reputation," pays off quite well and stands up easily to repeated reading. EH's inborn talents were in the acuity of his eye and his ear (he had to learn writing the hard way) and if the finale found him struggling with sentences once more, the eye and the ear had only magnificently and spookily ripened.

Fortunately I had read Death in the Afternoon before absorbing this last encore. By the end, I was attached at the soul to both matadors, (Cain and Abel!?). I wish I could read the other 50,000 words edited from this work. Papa described everything that was behind the fragile curtain of honor, bravado, showmanship, and the pageantry of bullfighting. Like many musicians or athletes of our time, we cannot observe from behind the scenes all the work, travel and lack of sleep that these people go through, therefore we cannot fully appreciate the bullfighters of the "Lost Generation". I recommend this book to anyone who wants to experience this true American literary icon and Spanish culture and History. It is interesting to see the way Spain has changed over the years. This book is full of magic and it describes the drive and mild competitiveness that all men and women should have inside in order to suceed in today's harsh world. The introduction of James A. Michener is beautifully written by someone who knew Spain. The terms are helpful to any who is not familiar with basic bullfighting. This is one of Papa's most under-appreciated least-recognized works, but that's ok with me.

During the 1959 bullfighting season, Hemingway travels with one of the matadors and his team throughout Spain. Hemingway's other book on bullfighting, "Death In the Afternoon" is more well-known and perhaps more informative, strictly speaking, but it is dry in comparison to "The Dangerous Summer," which has the pace of an adventure novel or a thriller. And in that respect it seems to capture the excitement of bullfighting better than "Death in the Afternoon." (I say "seems to" because I've never been to a bullfight.) I also loved the descriptions of Spain that Hemingway offers as they travel around the country.

Fabulous Hemingway! I wish I had a large map of Spain to hilite as I read this book but, honestly, I couldn't get out of my recliner, put the book down, and go look for one. What fabulous times those were for Ernesto and his coterie of friends and followers!! Makes me want to go to Pamplona but I can't run so well anymore.
DRS in Dallas

"The Dangerous Summer" is the last major work fully completed by Hemingway and it is a difficult subject to discuss, especially in today's world where animal rights protesters show up at book signings to drench people with fake blood because they disagree with their policies or politics. Bullfighting was in its heyday from the 1920's through the 1950's- and those are the years that Ernest Hemingway saw hundreds of bullfights all around Spain, where the masters of the art worked, drank, caroused and some died from their wounds. Hemingway wanted to describe- in exquisite detail- the sights, sounds, smells and emotion of a bullfight in a way which had never been done before and he succeeded grandly. However, his book never garnered recognition as a major work on the level of "For Whom the Bell Tolls" or "The Sun Also Rises" because the topic was controversial and the writing style more like reporting to some rather than true prose. The reviews of this work which rate it according to the standards set by Hemingway's other major novels often miss the major point of the book- to simply describe exactly what it is like to sit in the stands, watching the matadors and picadors practice their art...tempting the fierce monsters near them which could easily kill them at any moment....waving the tantalizing red cape, taunting the bulls to attack them and then deftly maneuvering around the bulls as they grow ever more agitated....This is a difficult book for some to read...yet it is not a difficult book to understand.

On first reading, "The Dangerous Summer" can be a challenge to appreciate. I have never seen a bullfight live, but would like to someday after reading this great book. I came to understand the language- and even more important- the body language- of bullfighting, the thought processes of the matadors, what the crowd wants and expects....and in the end- the human diorama that Hemingway portrays as he hints that we are all in that ring...we are all faced at some point with death...sometimes through actions of our own choosing....and that we will all someday die....It is Hemingway's fear to die without honor...as he abhors cowardice and the thought that he would not be brave in the face of danger....The matadors face death willingly every day they set foot in the ring...it is what they do bravely...what almost all people would never do....but Hemingway loves this challenge...facing death every day....staring it in the eyes....never flinching...It is what inspired so many of his books....

"The Dangerous Summer" stands as a great book, not a great novel in the standard sense of the term. It is illustrative, interesting, sometimes fascinating, chilling to read and often frightening to those who never dreamed of looking at death in this way...Yet Hemingway knew death very well....from his 200-plus schrapnel wounds in World War I, to chasing Nazi submarines during World War II and his numerous accidents (concussions, bone-breaking injuries, plane crashes and other assorted tragedies which nearly killed him)...facing it...and writing about it inspired him. This book is an inspiration to those who want to understand what it is like to stand in that ring, alone, facing death...on their last day.

-by Gene Pisasale,
Author of "Vineyard Days"

What was Dangerous about this summer? Two matadors, related by marriage, entered the ring to establish himself as the greatest of Spain's matadors and, in so doing, each performed an increasingly risky set of moves. Hemingway fretted over both, but he could not choose to ignore the display. It was, he said, tragic to watch the two of them, and tragic not to watch. There is precious little introspection in these pages. Still, I read with envy, wishing I could have been along for the ride. This book is now as much history as literature. The New York Times reported recently that the Madrid hotel favored by Matadors will soon be demolished to make way for a new, Hard Rock Cafe Hotel. And, the bullfight itself, for any number of reasons, is a ghost of what it once was, generating revenue of around $1 billion dollars per year from approximately 17,000 contests. I doubt the Matador will disappear anytime soon, but the era covered in The Dangerous Summer is long past. What Hemingway left us is the active participant's guide to another time and place.

I must admit that Hemingway is one of my fovorite writers. This book covers the bullfighting season of 1959 in Spain. More specifically it is about a mano a mano between two of the greatest bullfighters of the time. This book is very detialed in the descriptions of the bullfights. Being a big fan of Hemmingway's other bullfighting books (Death in the Afternoon and The Sun Also Rises), I really enjoyed his wonderful descriptions of the bullfights, and would recomend this book to anyone who enjoyed either of these. This book is also great for anyone who is interested in bullfighting and wants to read what one of the most respected aficionados on the subject has to say about it.

I am not one for bull fighthing but Hemingway, as always puts things in such wonderful words. I felt, I was a fan of the sport. Very wonderful book about his friendship with a bull fighter, Papa does a wonderful job explaining to someone whom knows nothing about bullfighting and allowing us to see it through his eyes.