The Making of Toro: Bullfights, Broken Hearts, and One Author's Quest for the Acclaim He Deserves - Hardcover

Sundeen, Mark

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743236165 ISBN 13: 9780743236164

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2003

Synopsis

Mark Sundeen needed to stage a comeback. His first book was little read, rarely reviewed, and his book tour was cancelled. So when a careless big city publisher calls with an offer for a book about bullfighting, Mark assumes this is his best and last chance to follow the trajectory of his literary heroes. To be sure, Sundeen has never been to a bullfight. He doesn't speak Spanish. He's not even a particularly good reporter. Come to think of it, he's probably one of the least qualified people to write a book about bullfighting, even in the best of circumstances. But that doesn't stop Mark Sundeen. After squandering most of the book advance on back rent and debts, Sundeen can't afford a trip to Spain, so he settles for nearby Mexico. But the bullfighting he finds south of the border is tawdry and comical, and people seem much more interested in the concessions and sideshows. There's little of the passion and artistry and bravery that he'd hoped to employ in exhibiting his literary genius to the masses. To compensate for his own shortcomings as an author, Sundeen invents an alter ego, Travis LaFrance, a swashbuckling adventure writer, in the tradition of his idol, Ernest Hemingway. But as his research falters, his money runs out, and the deadline approaches, Sundeen's high-minded fantasies are skewered by his second-rate reality. Eventually, Travis LaFrance steps in to take control, and our narrator goes blundering through the landscape of his own dreams and delusions, propelled solely by a preposterous, quixotic, and ultimately heartbreaking insistence that his own life story, no matter how crummy, is worth being told in the pages of Great Literature. The Making of Toro is a unique comic classic, a hilarious poke in the ribs of self-important "literary memoirs," and also a sly, poignant tale of the hazards of trying too hard to turn real life into high art.

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Review

Already the author of one gonzo collection of travel misadventures (2000's Car Camping), Utah-based writer Mark Sundeen is garnering comparisons to archly ironic humorists David Sedaris and Dave Eggers with his second tome, The Making of Toro, but his comical boasting and defiant flights of hyperbolic fancy have more in common with another peer, Neal Pollack, as well as his most obvious influence, the great Hunter S. Thompson. The premise of The Making of Toro is lifted straight out of Hemingway: A publisher approaches Sundeen with the idea of writing a colorful, testosterone-fueled book about bullfighting in Mexico. In true postmodern fashion, the writer rises to the occasion by inventing an accomplished and swaggering Raoul Duke-like alter ego, Travis LaFrance (author of the earlier swashbuckling classic, Fun With Falconry), to mask the fact that he has little actual reporting experience, doesn't speak Spanish, and is woefully short on testosterone himself. (You won't find his brand of hapless travelogue in (Men's Journal.)

Not surprisingly, there's nothing romantic about Sundeen's vision of bullfighting and its macho practitioners. Addicted to wandering off the beaten path, he'd much rather chat with the folks who dispose of the carcasses afterwards. "In the bullring the crowd roars in ecstasy," he writes toward the end of his search for the soul of this bloody sport. "I've heard it before: the sound of great bullfighting happening while I'm in the men's room or snack shack or out in the tunnel for fresh air. I'm writing a book, and the guy whose job it is to lug the beef onto the truck demands to be interviewed. So while the matador is killing with a single graceful thrust, I'm outside the meat truck learning about Oscar Rodriguez." In the end, though, Oscar's story and many others like it are far more interesting than the cliché-ridden tales we usually get in books about glamorous, manly pursuits like climbing Everest or diving down to the Titanic, and Sundeen's wonderfully dry and evocative prose is a joy to read as he takes us behind the scenes to the dark alleys where many adventurers would never think to look. --Jim DeRogatis

About the Author

Mark Sundeen is the author of Car Camping and lives in Utah.

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0743236165
• ISBN 13: 9780743236164
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 192