Duende: A Journey Into the Heart of Flamenco [Hardcover]

Jason Webster (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 18, 2003

The music started: two guitarists beating out more Alboreás. The women took turns to dance in a frenzy, each trying to outdo the other. “Deep Song always sings in the night,” Lorca had written. It was the credo of the flamenco: a rejection of the mundane, the ordinary, the life of the everyday man, embracing, rather, an extreme world – extreme passions, extreme feelings, the extremes of life and death. And it was a way of life I wanted to believe in – its excitement, its danger, the affirmation it gave you that you were different, and alive.

Destined for a sedate and predictable life in academia, Jason Webster was derailed in his early twenties when his first love, an aloof Florentine beauty, dumped him unceremoniously. Loveless and eager for adventure – and determined to fulfill a secret dream -- he left Oxford and headed for Spain, the country that had long captivated his imagination, and set off in search of duende, the intense and mysterious emotional state – part ecstasy, part melancholy – that is the essence of Spain’s signature art form: flamenco.

Duende is Webster’s captivating memoir of the years he spent in Spain pursuing his obsession. Studying flamenco guitar until his fingers bleed, he becomes involved in a passionate yet doomed affair with Lola, a flamenco dancer (and older woman) married to the gun-toting Vicente, only to flee the coastal city of Alicante in fear for his life. He ends up in Madrid, miserable and lovelorn, but it’s here that he has his first taste of the gritty world of flamenco’s progenitors – the Gypsies whose edgy lives and fervent commitment to the art of flamenco vividly illustrate the path to duende. Before long he is deeply immersed in a flamenco underworld that combines music and dance with drugs and crime. After two years Webster moves on to Granada where, bruised and battered, he reflects on his discovery of the emotional heart of Spain.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this enjoyable Spanish travel memoir, Webster, a Brit primed for a career in academia, attempts to infiltrate the insular, vivacious world of flamenco. Moving from Italy to Spain, he becomes obsessed with learning the intricacies of flamenco guitar and seeking out the elusive yet passionate feeling of duende, an untranslatable term referring to the feeling that is the essence of flamenco. Beginning in the sleepy Mediterranean city of Alicante, he learns the fundamentals of playing from a brash flamenco guitarist and is accepted into a small group of Andalusian music aficionados. It's not long before he falls in love with a fiery-eyed dancer, but since she's married to the director of a language school where Webster teaches English, the relationship is doomed: it would never endure within the gossip-laden city. So Webster flees to Madrid, where he slips into the marginalized and dangerous gypsy community. There, he befriends two flamenco musicians who offer him a glimpse into the world of duende. "It's about living on the edge... playing until your fingers bleed," one tells him, "taking yourself as far as you can go, and then going one step further." Although the story occasionally hits a flat note, Webster makes up for it by fluidly interlacing his foreigner's perspective with edgy and often perilous cravings to live the life of a genuine flamenco guitarist. Touring with a musical group throughout southern Spain, he learns from the gypsies that duende is an introspective emotion that materializes only when one can let go of frustrations and allow music's rawness to infuse the soul. Webster deserves praise for verbalizing an emotion that most people can only feel or imagine. (On sale Mar. 11)
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Webster was born near San Francisco; lived in England, Germany, and Egypt; and was educated at prestigious Oxford University--but why be a dreary academic when in your soul you believe you are destined to be a flamenco guitarist? With a pocketful of dreams, a basic knowledge of Spanish, and nominal playing skills, Jason sets out for Spain to immerse himself in the underground world of flamenco. In Alicante, Jason meets a small group of aficionados and begins training in the art of playing the passionate pieces while conducting an affair with a volatile, married dancer named Lola. Eluding certain death at the hands of Lola's husband and searching for the authentic gypsy style, Jason travels to Madrid, where he hopes to learn the hidden messages of duende, an intoxicating, trancelike mood created by the mysterious strumming of the flamenco guitar and a fervent dancer. Webster's memoir of his ardent calling is an edgy, daring account of the lengths one man will go to in order to be accepted in a world that revolves around tormented passions. Elsa Gaztambide
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Broadway; 1 edition (March 18, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0767911660
• ISBN-13: 978-0767911665
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,204,692 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Jason Webster was born in Mountain View, California, and educated at St John's College, Oxford, where he studied Arabic and Islamic History. After living in the US, Britain, Germany, Italy and Egypt, he moved to Spain in his early 20s. He owns a mountain farm in Castellón province, where he plants oak trees, keeps bees, makes olive oil and distills liver-destroying firewater when not working on his new series of detective novels. He is married to the flamenco dancer Salud and they have two sons.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Yo! This is a personal story, not a manual, April 21, 2004

By 

L. K. Coleman (New Orleans, LA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Duende: A Journey Into the Heart of Flamenco (Hardcover)

I think the problem that some of the thumbs-down reviewers had with this book was that they got sidetracked by the subtitle, "a journey into the heart of Flamenco." They apparently thought that it was going to be a didactic work. (The author is an Oxford graduate, so we must use words like "didactic"). Instead, it's a very personal story, a "tell all" about the author's experiences as a foreigner (i.e., non-Spaniard) trying to lead a flamenco life, and I don't find that it was represented as anything other than that. And insofar as that story goes, it was generally well written

What is clear is that Jason Webster came to Spain in search of flamenco without doing any prior research or study, not even having touched a guitar previously - rather odd for an Oxford grad, but maybe that was part of what he was running away from. That's what got him into all the strange and sometimes funny scenes he relates because seemingly every flamenco aficionado he ran into was a self-proclaimed "expert" who told him something different.

Poor Jason also came to the wrong places: Valencia and Alicante on the southeast coast of Spain, two venues that are well outside flamenco's incubators: southwest Andalucía (Cádiz, Jeréz and Sevilla province in particular), and Madrid, the capital where most of the best artists end up because it provides the best means of earning a living. That's just about analogous to someone coming to the United States in search of jazz and blues but starting out with a flat in Des Moines, Iowa, then moving on to Butte, Montana. He did get to Granada, which has a much smaller but increasingly thriving flamenco scene, but only after a good deal of trial and error - and then he went back to the southeast coast anyway. And that was after living in a poor suburb of Madrid without ever visiting the thriving dance studios where he could have met and learned to play with some really good artists instead of stealing cars and doing lines of coke.

Those missteps probably lead the author to the main title, "Duende." Many an experienced flamenco groans when they hear that word. Federico García Lorca started the craze for "duende" back in the twenties, and Donn Pohren enshrined it for all English-speaking aficionados through his work, "The Art of Flamenco", first published in the early sixties and which for many decades was the only book in English on the subject. "Duende" literally means an elf or gnome, and can include poltergeists as well. It did imply "soul" or "spirit" within some circles in flamenco, but overuse caused such word inflation that its original meaning was greatly devalued, and many flamencos came to avoid it. "Aire" was the principal word used instead of "duende" when I lived in Spain in the early seventies, and now one also hears "pellizco" which may or may not mean the same thing. "Duende" is today more often used by promoters in the tourist trade rather than artists. Of course, the use of that word in the title might well be due to the publisher rather than the author, but that would be consistent: "Duende" once again being used to sell something rather than describe it.

The one serious bone I might have to pick with the author, however, is his intimation that drugs are an integral, even necessary, part of being a flamenco. True, drugs became very pervasive in the post-Franco era, but they have never been anything close to "necessary." For over a hundred years flamenco did quite well fueled solely with nicely fermented grape juice, perhaps a bit of distilled spirit, but that was it. Weed, coke, hash are strictly optional and mostly detrimental. He seems to have swallowed the drugs-are-necessary idea hook, line and sinker, but the fact that the particular Gypsies he hung out with had to steal cars to make ends meet attests to their lack of success as professional flamenco artists. Drugs and thievery are dead ends, not roads to the heart of flamenco or anything else. Yes, Camaron de la Isla, one of flamenco's greats, used lots of drugs and smoked like a house on fire. He also died at the age of 42. (But if you do enough drugs you just might see a few duendes.)

The back jacket cover says that the author still lives in Valencia. If he harbors any hope of writing a sequel, he better start thinking about moving to where there's at least a flamenco road to follow.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not 'the' book on flamenco, but a good read nevertheless, September 26, 2003

By 

Megami (Darwin, Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Duende: A Journey Into the Heart of Flamenco (Hardcover)

After finishing the introduction to this book I was despairing. The narrator/author came across as a real prat, and combined with the fact I am quite sick of the `I took an extended holiday and justified it by writing a book' genre, I thought I was almost guaranteed not to like this book. Luckily, I was wrong.

That is not to say Duende is a great book. There are faults - the conclusion is a mess, and occasionally the author makes trivial facts out to be momentous ones. There is also the problem that some of the characters feel as though they have not been properly thought out - the prime example for me is Grace, who appears in the Granada section of the book. However, this is a very good book. It is the story of an Englishman who decides to move to Spain and pursue his love of flamenco. This is quite amazing when you consider that he has never learned guitar before and has now decided to take on a rather complex and complicated form of playing. You have to admire his pluck.

Through his searches for `authentic' flamenco, the author falls in with a bunch of gypsies, never sure whether he is truly accepted or just there for novelty value. After a shocking incident, he moves on, and leaves Madrid for Granada, reassessing his life as he goes.

This book is an interesting narrative - it has love, passion, interesting characters and well described, evocative settings. But it is more than that - using flamenco as the medium, Webster explores what happens when we use an outside `thing' (in this case flamenco) to try and run away from internal forces (feelings of inadequacy, searching for meaning). We follow Webster down the false leads he chases to find this `thing', the true spirit of flamenco that he feels will answer his quest, all the time questioning his reasoning and motivations.

There have been some criticisms that this is not a very good book about flamenco. I don't think that it was intended to `write the book' about flamenco; rather, it is using flamenco as a medium to explore various themes. I can count on one hand the number of times I have been fortunate enough to see a live flamenco performance, but this book has made me interested enough to want to seek out more. And I would say that means it has done its job.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great Young Writer, Helleva of First Book, May 1, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Duende: A Journey Into the Heart of Flamenco (Hardcover)

Jason Webster's first book about Spain and flamenco is a gorgeous first effort. It's a story about Webster's travels as flamenco student and touring guitar-player, his doomed loves and the impulsive choices, and living life on the margins of gypsy society. This well-written book is fresh, honest, and emotionally unkept. There are no neat endings or resolutions. But it hardly matters. What a book, what a ride!