Running with the Bulls: Fiestas, Corridas, Toreros, and an American's Adventure in Pamplona

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.

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.

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 t

After reading Gray's book, I was more tempted to go to pamplona to join in the festivities of Sanfermin! The discription made me feel like I was actually there!

Running with the Bulls is definitely a fun book and a must read for anyone going to Spain or the Festival of San Fermin. The author takes us on a grand tour of Spain and introduces us to the bullfight and the encierro--where he runs only inches ahead of the 6 killer bulls and 8 steers through Pamplona's narrow cobblestone streets.We can almost taste the rich Basque food and the sangria as the Festival takes place all around us. It's an easy read and there are 16 pages of color photos of the corrida, the run and the Festival. The book's epilogue is an informative guide that gives suggestions regarding how to run in the encierro.