5 comments about Running with the Bulls: Fiestas, Corridas, Toreros, and An American's Adventure in Pamplona.

1. As a paradoxically resisting and admiring reader and teacher of Hemingway for many years, I opened Gary Gray's "Running with the Bulls" on a recent summer evening with a similar sense of ambivalence. Described to me earlier as "Under the Tuscan Sun on adrenaline," my post-read corrective of "Running with the Bulls" would be: "More like 'Under the Tuscan Sun' on testosterone"--and with far more passion, character, and heart than Francis Mayes' aesthetically gorgeous but rather icy treatise on Tuscany.

   From the start, Gray displays a charming lack of self-consciousness about the ways in which his perennial quest for running with the Pamplona bulls in the July festival of San Fermin positions him as a Hemingway wannabe'. The author nods often and authentically to how Don Ernesto's "The Sun Also Rises," "Death in the Afternoon," and "The Dangerous Summer," motivated his own, original 1980 visit to Pamplona--and continues to inform his annual treks. Even so, the Hemingway intertextuality of "Running with the Bulls," never annoys. As Gray narrates twenty-two years of his own American adventures in Spain, the reader is rewarded with a retrospective animated by Gray's considerably unique sensibility. As these 17 or 18 separate pilgrimages to Pamplona from 1980-2001 weave together to form a single narrative tapestry about Spain, bullfighting, Pamplonese food and bar and folk culture, what impressed me was the distinctiveness Gray gives each vignette, often separated by many years. From the 1980 side trip to Tangiers with his then fiancee, Katie O'Toole, to the 2001 San Fermin's "next generation" running with the bulls with Gray's two oldest daughters, the reader is rewarded with lucidly recollected and deliciously described sensous detail. From the poppy fields and olive groves in the Sierra Nevada Mountains to the numerous three-hour Spanish dinner with cocktails, wine, lamb, bull stew, scallops, flan and coffee (no paella?), Gray treats each meal, each bullfight, each side-trip and conversation with old American and new Pamplonan friends, with rich reverance, delivering them to the reader not as narrative description but as the stuff of life.

   Okay--so if this book has a flaw--and even the greatest of works does--it is the relentlessness of these details. By the second half of the book, without a larger personal tension or evolving historical, political, or social commentary to sustain them, the catalogues of bullfighting minutia, drinking escapades, and restaurant fare begin to function in the reader's imagination more as accounting ledgers than the rich layers of story-telling. But given how much the author is drinking and how little he is sleeping on this collage of separate trips, his ability to recall how a particular torero worked the bull in 1987, or the specific quality of a salty ham appetizer and rioja reserva wine in 1991, astounds and impresses. That said, the second half of the book often repeats rather than develops the themes of the travelogue's first part--at that point, I resisted the impulse to skim.

   But his book is so much more that an American hedonist's journal of Pamplonan bullfighting and festivals. I deeply admired the spiritual structure of the work. If Hemingway's and Gray's bullfighting rings are existential metaphors for the passion of life and the terrible but noble inevitabiltiy of death, Gray shows himself by book's end as adept if secualr a metaphysician as he is a partyer. Punctuating twenty-some years of narrative revelry in this text is a well-narrated political assisination, the birth of Gray's six children and the deaths of many more bulls. The work ends with a bittersweet memento morti as Gray meditates on the death of an elderly restaurateur and a young and dashing torero--both of whom had lived with what Gray values supremely, lives, and gives as a significant gift to his reader in each page of "Running with the Bulls"--aficion.




2. It has always been one of my goals to run with the bulls in Pamplona. I traveled to Pamplona, Spain 07/05/02 and ran on two of the days during the festival. I bought a copy of Gary Gray's book a few months before I left and I am so happy I did. It was an essential part of my preparation. Mr. Gray outlines the run and Pamplona through his own accounts and makes the book extremely enjoyable for the reader. If you are considering running with the bulls or even if you would like to learn more about San Fermin this book is a must! Mr. Gray does an outstanding job of educating the reader about the run and the events that follow.



3. Running with the Bulls starts with an enticing prologue that seems to set a wonderfully exciting pace for the book. But it quickly cuts off into nothing more than the author's travel journal about how he spent his summer vacation in Spain.

   The cover photo is amazing, but unfortunately it's the only good photo in the book. The rest are nothing more than snapshots of the author and his friends with a couple of good shots of bullfights.

   The book does provide some good information about fiesta, the encierro & bullfights - but better information is probably available elsewhere.




4. Gary Gray paints a picture of what it is like to partake in Pamplona's Fiesta De San Fermin. From the moment the rocket goes off during the encierro, to the afternoon corrida, Gary manages to share his love for fiesta and especially the people who make fiesta so great. If you have been or are thinking of going to Pamplona, you should read this book. It is a great learning tool to acclimate yourself to Pamplona and fiesta. Gary also gives you an insight to some of the moments during fiesta when you need a break and shows you more of Pamplona and Navarra.



5. The really interesting thing about reading Gary Gray's very personal memoir of his travels to Spain and his times in Pamplona's Fiesta is this: The experiences he shares which may seem so unique to the reader are experiences available to anyone who makes the journey to Pamplona each July, and Gray makes this point for the reader. He let's the reader know that in this very foreign culture with it's own age-old customs, traditions, rites and rituals an American can not only be easily accepted - -he or she can be embraced, indeed adopted by local Navarrans as Gray was by people who have become part of his family.

   When this book was published, it had been over thirty years since an American had published a book on Pamplona, and if there was one central point to make above all others, it is the point made that is referenced in the preceeding paragraph, i.e. this fiesta which seems so foreign from afar can seem very familiar up close.

   This is a personal story, an up close look through the eyes of one person and what the reader is able to see is well worth seeing.

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