Word: braved
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...BRAVE BULLS (270 pp.)-Lea -Little, Brown...
Nobody has written as well as this about toros and toreros since Heming way's Death in the Afternoon. Unlike Hemingway's masterpiece, which was part fine reporting and part esthetics, The Brave Bulls is a novel written up to the classic hilt, with the sweat of honest craftsmanship; it goes a long way toward being, like the corrida that is its climax "a combat without adornment, all tragedy, all truth...
...Second Tequila. So The Brave Bulls, Lea's first novel, is a war book of a kind that most critics forgot to expect. The Brave Bulls has nothing, ostensibly, to do with the war, but the sand of the bull ring in this book is also the sand of the Peleliu beaches; the black and powerful truth that fills the book is the truth of death that marines learned on Peleliu's Bloody Nose Ridge...
Dealing Death, In detail, The Brave Bulls is alive with precise knowledge: of the moods and lingo of bullfighters, the atmosphere and routine of a great Mexican breeding ranch, the elaborate ritual of the corrida itself. The writing is clumsy in places, but it is also direct, penetrating and sustained; it makes the slicker sorts of professionalism look pointless. And the book is, finally, both religious in its treatment of ultimates and morally eloquent in its strong rebuke for those who scorn any culture but their...
There is no philosophical talk about bullfighting in The Brave Bulls until the writer has thoroughly pictured the rawness, depravity and greed that go into it with the bravery. Then he allows a little group of aficionados to say a few things...