April 19–26, 2001

book quicks

On Bullfighting

By A. L. Kennedy
Anchor Books, 165 p., $11

It’s an unsettling strategy to open a book about bullfighting with a suicide attempt, but unsettled is how author A. L. Kennedy wants you. What brought her back from the ledge wasn’t newfound faith, but the fact that she didn’t want to die with an irritating Irish folk song ringing in her ears. The fact that the phone rang with an assignment to cover bullfighting in Spain came a little later — and the realization that there’s no way to jump from a ledge with dignity.

On Bullfighting is equal parts balanced memoir and faithful telling of the hypnotic, bloody, brutal and ancient world of bullfighting. I find her own struggles even more fascinating than her insider’s view (as inside as a Scottish woman barely fluent in Spanish can get) of the matador’s balletic work. It’s Kennedy’s struggle to find redemption and reasons to live redemption that resonates.

Of course, there is plenty about bullfighting in the book, from its place in history, traced back to similar Roman and Pagan rituals, to the controversy surrounding it today, and gripping first-hand accounts of the death of many bulls — and a matador as well. But while Kennedy makes no obvious connections between her own suicide attempt and the "suicidal risk-taking" acts of bullfighters, the connection is clear. Call it genetic; call it a hazard of the profession — either writing or bullfighting.

It’s a slight letdown when we learn that what drove Kennedy to want to take her own life was a trifling matter of the heart; a slight, an indignity, a wound that would no doubt heal with time, as we all know they do. But matters of the heart are rarely rational. Kennedy herself knows this, and buries the matter deep within the book, giving it far less attention than it achieved in her life; a short paragraph, blink and you’ll miss it, the way most of us want to remember our own personal, devastating incidents.

If you’re just cynical enough, you’ll find that the author’s choice to live is in fact the happy ending most of us should focus on achieving, instead of the usual pedestrian, perhaps impossible dreams of happiness and success. Being alive is a triumph in itself. On Bullfighting doesn’t exactly celebrate life, but pinpoints its frailty and temporary condition, and suggests that we not take these things for granted.

—Alex Richmond