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A review by jfl
The Dangerous Summer by Ernest Hemingway
3.0
The Dangerous Summer is, I believe, the last manuscript that Hemingway worked on in its totality before his death in 1961. The work is based on the 1959 mano-a-mano between Antonio Ordóñez and Luis Miguel Dominguín. Hemingway not only chronicled the competition between the two Spanish bullfighters but also his own experiences in Spain during the 1959 bullfighting season as he crisscrossed the country from Andalucía in the south to Cataluña in the northeast and points in-between.
The text itself, published in 1985, was heavily edited by Scribners. The original manuscript ran to 120,000 words and apparently included details on any number of other bullfighters in addition to Ordóñez and Dominguín. In its substantially edited 1985 version the book captures the essence of the contest between those two matadors as well as a sense of Spain and its people in the late 1950s.
Within the Hemingway canon, the book is a companion piece to The Sun Also Rises and to Death in the Afternoon with their descriptions of Spain and of bullfighting. It also provides glimpses into Hemingway’s own physical and emotional states in the last years leading up to his death.
There was for me an added attraction. My first extended stay in Spain occurred just 3 years after Hemingway’s 1959 travels. The countryside he described, the places he visited and the roads he traveled have changed greatly since that time past but they were the places, roads and by-ways that I knew first hand and that have stayed with me, etched into my memory. Reading The Dangerous Summer was a pleasant romp with nostalgia.
The text itself, published in 1985, was heavily edited by Scribners. The original manuscript ran to 120,000 words and apparently included details on any number of other bullfighters in addition to Ordóñez and Dominguín. In its substantially edited 1985 version the book captures the essence of the contest between those two matadors as well as a sense of Spain and its people in the late 1950s.
Within the Hemingway canon, the book is a companion piece to The Sun Also Rises and to Death in the Afternoon with their descriptions of Spain and of bullfighting. It also provides glimpses into Hemingway’s own physical and emotional states in the last years leading up to his death.
There was for me an added attraction. My first extended stay in Spain occurred just 3 years after Hemingway’s 1959 travels. The countryside he described, the places he visited and the roads he traveled have changed greatly since that time past but they were the places, roads and by-ways that I knew first hand and that have stayed with me, etched into my memory. Reading The Dangerous Summer was a pleasant romp with nostalgia.