The Corrida at San Feliu

by Paul Scott

1964, American hardcover edition, Morrow, NY, 277-page early novel by the author.

Genres: Fiction

221 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1964

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Paul Mark Scott was an English novelist best known for his tetralogy The Raj Quartet. In the last years of his life, his novel Staying On won the Booker Prize (1977). The series of books was dramatised by Granada Television during the 1980s and won Scott the public and critical acclaim that he had not received during his lifetime.
Born in suburban London, Scott was posted to India, Burma and Malaya during World War II. On return to London he worked as a notable literary agent, before deciding to write full time from 1960. In 1964 he returned to India for a research trip, though he was struggling with ill health and alcoholism. From the material gathered he created the novels that would become The Raj Quartet. In the final years of his life he accepted a visiting professorship at the University of Tulsa, where much of his private archive is held.

Reviews

[mark monday · Rating 4 out of 5]

BURIED TREASURE ALERT: the works of Paul Scott. he is perhaps most famous for his excellent The Raj Quartet and its 1977 Booker Prize winning follow up novel Staying On (in my opinion, a gentle and wise novel but clearly a lesser work). outside of those classics, it feels like he is practically unknown. i never come across references to him and reviews for his other novels are rather impossible to find. this is a real surprise; his novels are filled with expert characterization, topical & timeless themes (particularly in terms of class conflict, racial tension, and What Makes A Man? and Can Men Ever Truly Be Brothers?) and - because they draw upon his years of experience in India - they are filled with absorbing historical detail.

The Corrida at San Feliu is written with the seriousness of intent and all the confidence, depth of emotion, and ironic humor of a master-class writer. it is a rather short novel, and overall may be considered a minor work. but ah, the riches buried within!

i've been avoiding giving a synopsis of Corrida because it is hard to give a quick description of all the things going on in this little book. its size is compact - but it is larger on the inside than the outside. i suppose, in a long-winded nutshell, you could say it is about some of my favorite literary themes... the gap between reality and true understanding, the distance between individuals, the way we humans mold our memories and perceptions to better deal with the troubling things in our lives, the way we fool ourselves, how the past will always haunt the present and impact the future. it is about a man who is not just at an impasse in his life, he is breaking down, a slow-burning kind of collapse. it is about the power of storytelling and its dangers as well. it is the story of a man and a woman and all the possible, potential permutations of that relationship. it is about a relationship ending. it is about new ways of seeing old things and the flexibility of perspective. it is a tale of death and of love. it is about how you can't go home again and how that home - whatever "home" even means - maybe never existed in the first place.

the structure is purposely distancing. it forces the reader to pay attention, to take their time in getting to the heart of this novel's reason for being. the first section is a straightforward biography of an imaginary writer. that is followed by four very short tales: the first appears to be a little fable about an ill-conceived leopard hunt in africa, the second is about an ill-fated romance in India, the third is about an arrival of a couple at a Spanish villa, the fourth is about a version of that couple arriving at an Indian estate. the second half of the book (sequentially, the sixth "tale") gets to the heart of the matter. a man and his much younger wife are in Spain. he is a writer and she is a trophy. he feels distance between them; he is obsessed with a possible affair she may be having. he thinks upon his life and loves, his family, his wife's past life, the people who have haunted them both. full of dread, he thinks upon the bullfighting at the San Feliu Corrida. characters appear and reappear, they live throughout all the tales in the book, they change and transform and are given different motivations, different outcomes, different perspectives. the narrator's grasping & unimaginative uncle becomes a vindictive leopard hunter in one tale. a virginal young woman is a cold but rather sad object of lust in one story and then her story is retold in another tale... we get to understand her frustrations and anger from different angles, her motivations become clear, her story becomes a genuine tragedy. we see the main couple in question in different forms: young, old, full of hope, full of fear & resentment, glamorous & beautiful, sad & deeply flawed, haunted by their past, looking to their future, locked in stasis. we see all the possibilities of a relationship ending, of life ending - and why this must inevitably come to pass.

the novel ends with a long passage regarding a bullfight at the Corrida. i must admit to having a good deal of trepidation about this sequence. personally, i'm of an opinion that bullfighting is about as tasteful & interesting as fox-hunting. or hunting children. but nevertheless, i stuck with it, and was rewarded with profundity. the narrator imagines the confrontation between bull and tormenters from all angles: from a young bullfighter, from an old one, from the lady that the bullfight is dedicated to, from the bullfighter's assistants, and - most tragically, most empathetically - from the bull itself. and it not all about supplying multiple angles, telling different tales. everything exists on both the level of story and in how these perspectives reflect the lives of the novel's characters. this passage - well the novel itself as a whole, the way that actions and perspectives and meaning change, flow into each other, become interpreted as story, become transformed... it is all such a remarkably multi-leveled accomplishment.

here is a relatively minor passage concerning a relatively minor character... note the fluidity of perspective, the collapsing of time, the startling movement from a life about to happen to sudden death and finally a terribly unknowable portrait of futility and sorrow:

Alone with Leela he said, 'Will you be my wife?' And she replied, 'I will be whatever you want me to be,' and knelt in front of him so that he experienced a sensation of being both mocked and worshipped, and wondered whether God too was alive to the ambiguity of such gestures. She had her mother's, not her father's bones. The creamy, only slightly tinted flesh was stretched fine, almost transparently over them. It seemed to Craddock that like so many Indian women she was built for burning. Dry and brittle in the body she would be gone in the first lick of flame, all except her eyes through which so far she had seen nothing of the world; through which, now, looking up at him, she conveyed to him something of her great, untapped capacity for living. Through those eyes he was aware of a similar capacity in himself and of immense reserves of energy.

All my life, he thought, I have conserved, stored up against an occasion of expenditure on some act I could be proud of and thankful for. He made her rise and keeping hold her small hands kissed them, as six months later, far away in their place of exile of their short marriage he kissed them as they were clenched, cold, sickly-sweet smelling, in the room where she lay dead of a cup of milk into which she had poured powdered glass, as if only the most agonizing end could adequately settle the reckoning of her brief encounter with the cruel world beyond the walls and garden of old Lady Brague's embattled, haunted bungalow. To die she had put on a simple cotton saree, made a pyre of the European clothes she had tried so hard to grace, and set light to them. The ashes, like her body, were cold, the bungalow deserted, the servants fled, the Mahwari Hills silent behind veils of mist that had melted on his eye-lids as he climbed the path calling her name and getting no answer, so that entering the darkened room he was already aware of the need to weep.

[Grace · Rating 5 out of 5]

My thought, reflections and notes on The Corrida at San Feliu ~ Paul Scott


After a series of books that saw me get personally involved with the characters amidst rants against the authors, I felt I had reached a point where I was ready to bid adieu to fiction altogether. That was when this book happened, highly recommended by a friend , whom I consider a connoisseur of good books .
Since I tend to have a blind faith in his choice of books I did not even bat an eyelid.



The story unfolds with the reported death of writer, Edward Thornhill and his wife Myra in a car accident, and the unearthing of several manuscripts by his friend. The heart of the story is the disintegrating marriage between Edward and Myra, whom he suspects of having an affair
We go through the mind of Edward who deals with the turmoil of being a cuckold ,in the only way he knew, and that is by weaving the reader through four seemingly disconnected stories, on which Edward was working on, before his death.
As the story weaves between an ill fated leopard hunt in Africa, a romance in India, a betrayal, the arrival of a couple in Playa de Faro and the arrival in Mahawar in India, the reader is left with a sense of wonder as to where the center of the story is. The stories blend and weave, and only by clinging tenaciously to the story, does the plot unravel the magnificent bridge between the novels within novels, that of a man and a woman appearing in a state of disgrace, at different settings in different places. We see Edward’s desperate attempt at trying to make sense of a disintegrating marriage, of trying to grasp the incapacity of men and women to love unselfishly. There is coldness in all of the characters, as though each merely playing a part in the grand production called Life.

The Corrida (The bullfight) is the grand finale to the story, where it is as much about the bullfight as it is about the metaphor for the relationship between men and women.... The physical and sexual attraction , the need to serve and be served, the desire to capture and avoid capture, the desire to be Lord and Master, even if it means driving a Pica through the sides of a bull/human, and to see the fall of a majestic being, be it animal or human, the need to feel the Victor, for a fleeting moment, and then to be swept up by a deep engulfing sense of loss, as the bull dies, the roar of the crowds die, are all so beautifully elucidated within the layers of this outstanding novel. The Corrida too is presented from all angles, that of the crowds, the matadors and even from the bull. It then, in my mind, came full circle (the significance of the circle depicted on the cover page) to the beginning of the book that touches briefly on the death of Edward and Myra, and I wondered if the seeds of the idea of death were borne in Edwards mind as he watched the bullfight.


What I loved about the book, was the way Paul Scott makes the reader work hard. The language is crisp, and Paul Scott's ability to create visual imagery is astounding. It slows one down as reader, as it is not meant to be an easy read, but to experience language in a breath taking way .
It would be a shame not to share one of the most profound passages, which to me tied up beautifully with the poignancy of the Corrida…

"Alone with Leela he said, 'Will you be my wife?' And she replied, 'I will be whatever you want me to be,' and knelt in front of him so that he experienced a sensation of being both mocked and worshipped, and wondered whether God too was alive to the ambiguity of such gestures. She had her mother's, not her father's bones. The creamy, only slightly tinted flesh was stretched fine, almost transparently over them. It seemed to Craddock that like so many Indian women she was built for burning. Dry and brittle in the body she would be gone in the first lick of flame, all except her eyes through which so far she had seen nothing of the world; through which, now, looking up at him, she conveyed to him something of her great, untapped capacity for living. Through those eyes he was aware of a similar capacity in himself and of immense reserves of energy.

All my life, he thought, I have conserved, stored up against an occasion of expenditure on some act I could be proud of and thankful for. He made her rise and keeping hold her small hands kissed them, as six months later, far away in their place of exile of their short marriage he kissed them as they were clenched, cold, sickly-sweet smelling, in the room where she lay dead of a cup of milk into which she had poured powdered glass, as if only the most agonizing end could adequately settle the reckoning of her brief encounter with the cruel world beyond the walls and garden of old Lady Brague's embattled, haunted bungalow. To die she had put on a simple cotton saree, made a pyre of the European clothes she had tried so hard to grace, and set light to them. The ashes, like her body, were cold, the bungalow deserted, the servants fled, the Mahwari Hills silent behind veils of mist that had melted on his eye-lids as he climbed the path calling her name and getting no answer, so that entering the darkened room he was already aware of the need to weep."

I owe this book a lot, for not just the power of words, but also for deconstructing my conviction that authors are spokespersons for a cause. These lines spoke directly to me:
" I don't want to be elevated to a position of social and cultural distinction on the shoulders of my work. The work is all that matters. It stands or falls by itself. But it stands or falls as a game.
As a writer, I do not feel that I have any special duty to society or feel, as a writer, that I should have any expectations or desire or hope of improving it or making it wiser or more tolerant, either by example, entreaty, satire, castigation, cheers or catcalls. I do not see myself as a novelist, as a man whose opinions on the burning questions of the day are of any outstanding importance.
As a man in society, I vote, pay taxes, have opinions, and argue with my neighbor when sober enough to understand what I am asked to support or drunk enough to find colorful words to refute.
But as a man who writes what is called fiction, I play no tune and dance to none, for in that capacity I am concerned not with panaceas, but with questions unsusceptible even of formulations."

I have not read a book that satisfied me in so many levels as this book. Thank you Venu, once again for giving me the gift of an absolute gem of a book.

[Bill Hsu · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was enjoying the layered narrative and the prose. But the long section near the end on the corrida lost me.

[Axel Ainglish · Rating 3 out of 5]

A complicated novel. Because of its complicated structure. I liked it, but will have to go again into it for did not read it in the proper moment, obviously. It requires an effort to the reader. For there are several stories within the story. Besides it jumps in time from one another so it may become difficult to link the whole. It goes about the ending of a couple affair. But this is just the excuse to sink us in their lives. The writer one and that of his young lover. It is beautifully written, full of thoughts about men and women love and desire ties. Here you find fine, deep thoughts about this. And about an incomingly foreseen death, too. As said, we see them in different moments of their lives, back and forth from present into past. Loved The Raj Quartet, already a classic of this underrated author. But that's an easy reading inspite of its four volumes. This, on the contrary, was an unexpectedly difficult work. The end scene of this novel had its fame and a deserved one, among its devoted readers. The whole requires your attention and thinking. A demanding novel, so. A real puzzle, I thought when read it. In which there's a lack of thrill, maybe. And a lack of a clearer action knots link, also, perhaps. If not, there is a risk of taking it as a bunch of not so short stories full of thoughts and metaphors about love relationships. It's curious to observe that the author may have seen heterosexual love as a sort of fight opposing themselves as in a bullfighting. Paul Scott was a homosexual and maybe that interfered hindering him to see it otherwise. Excuses in saying this, am not homofobic. It is just that I found that a bit shocking. As the whole is a shocking maze. Recommend it to readers willing to think about this matter and prepared to face complicated but good books.

[Davidcharlesbowmangmail.com · Rating 5 out of 5]

Flawed but brilliant in its way, this postmodern piece of metafiction, in which an author relates his real and imaginary domestic and cultural world to characters and episodes in his own writing, is perhaps heavy-handed and over-complex metaphorically, but many of the characters are inspired and fascinating. More significantly, his analysis of the functions and methods of literature and how it explores the truths of the world and of human nature, is one of the clearest I've seen.

The layered worlds where the more or less fictional characters live seems to hover between the imperial and the post-colonial, reminiscent of Hemingway and even Doris Lessing, but less tangible. The imagery of the tragic, doomed bull of the Corrida as a desolate 60-something cuckold is striking and memorable, if not entirely convincing. Still, the novel deserves a much wider audience.

[S Wood · Rating 5 out of 5]

I imagine it will be tough to find Paul Scott's books, here in the US anyway. The four-book set making up The Raj Quartet are in Apple Books, and is the epic achievement of Paul's career. But his earlier work is first rate, as well. Forgive this somewhat rambling set of notes on The Corrida at San Feliu.

As much as anything, I encourage Goodreads members to dip into the past and Paul Scott's work is a fine and today, far-too-little recognized, literary place to sample.

I was fortunate to study with Paul at The University of Tulsa many years ago. In class, Paul introduced us to the Duende ... which is the central image of The Corrida ... which takes many forms.

"It means imp, ghost, goblin. The Spanish poet Lorca wrote about it, the one who died mysteriously [and returns at the end of the novel]. They never found his body. He said the Duende burned the blood like powdered glass. Someone else, Manuel Torres I think, said that everything that had dark sounds had Duende. I think this is true. The Duende is inside, so the sounds that come are bound to be dark. It is easiest in music and singing to say whether a work or a performance has the Duende, but whatever type of work or performance it is it counts for nothing unless the Duende is hear. ..... [he goes on] I hear him weeping in the straw. There's a chain on his left leg and there's one part of the dungeon wall he can't get at to draw pictures on. I shout at him to break the chain. He curses me and tells me to break it myself. We both bleed form the strain. The book I would write is the picture he would draw on that part of the wall."

This intro may make the book sound dark. But it is far from such. There is much beauty in the writing.

That dark image of the Duende reaching for the wall becomes beautiful as in these paragraphs:

"And long before that there had been no bay. The blue-green sea scourged an unbroken line of terracotta colored rock. Immense teres stood on the hills with their thick branches heaving in the wind, jerking the long bell ropes of the lianas that chained them to the ground. In the deep indigo shadows of the trees fleshy plants clothed the hill-sides, stirred by the movement of the ropes and the wild currents of air. Sometimes the sun was obscured by boiling clouds from which rain lashed down and forks of lightning struck, lighting the eyes of serpents coiled watchfully under rocks and in the shallows of the sea. And when the storm of creation had died the serpents emerged and wound their way into the dense carpet of leaf and stalk. Strange birds flew above the trees and the plants were stirred now not by the wind but by the movements of animals.
"This was the scene of arrival too. They came from over the hill after a long cold journey and sat warming themselves against a rock; and after a while, not speaking, began to throw stones into the sea, remembering Eden."
...
"What did I see? A succession of slightly varying images? dramatic representation of my own endless struggle to transmute the raw perpetual motion of life into the perfect immobility of art?...Perhaps it is only in art that this more durable peace is to be found; not in the creation of it -- no, not there -- but in contemplation of what has been created, endless Edens, shapely worlds formed out of the terrible void and the deep blue darkness of endless frightening space; the carved stone, the painted canvas, the living world, the sound of music, the poster announcing the splendours of next week's corrida."

The book is layered, with stories within stories ... But the entirety is driven by a central question having to do with "two people turning up in disgrace." It is a simple and provocative theme that gives the novel a spine that energizes everything and holds it all together. Well, that and the bull fighting, which is a less vivid metaphor in our times, but certainly was at the time of the book, which takes place in the years before 1962.

There is a bit of India in The Corrida at San Feliu .... which may serve as a primer for The Raj Quartet, which is extraordinary -- and was made into a series by Granada TV in 1984. It appears to be viewable in YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBJu2...

[Lawrence FitzGerald · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a flawed work of genius. So why is it a work of genius and how is it flawed?

Paul Scott imagines an author, Edward Thornhill, who was orphaned by his missionary parents and left to the tender mercies of his grandfather and uncle, James. Thornhill is much older than his wife, Myra, whom he had met when she was engaged to John Thornhill, James's son. Edward and Myra are killed in a road accident in Spain. The papers and drafts of his most recent work were found and published as The Corrida at San Feliu along with a preface outlining Thornhill's life written by his literary agent.

Due to Thornhill's untimely death, The Corrida at San Feliu is a collection of related stories and scraps and his ultimate intent is not at all clear. In Part One Thornhill fictionalizes episodes of his own life in a few tenuously related stories. In Part Two Thornhill describes his relationship with his wife along with another fictionalized version and a long section devoted to a bullfight at the corrida of San Feliu. As things progress we begin to better understand the relationship between Thornhill's writing and his own life.

This is a work of genius. Instead of telling a story from multiple viewpoints, Scott is telling a story from multiple possibilities. In one possibility things are fine, in another not so good, in yet another even worse. It's kind of like Schroedinger's cat, both alive and dead until someone looks in the box - then kitty is either alive or dead or one of the undead, not all three. And this was first published in 1964 long before the comics discovered the multiverse.

But it is a bit flawed. I have five things I look for in a novel: story, characterization, world building, prose style and theme. And Scott does well on all of them (most of them). So why not four or five stars?

The first two stories, The Mountain Leopard and The First Betrayal, were really good. The remaining stories drifted between interesting and tedious except for the bullfight which was, for me, very tedious. Let's take these issues in turn. What separates the good from the drifters is the use of humor. Humor deepens pathos; if you want to make your reader cry, first make him laugh. Scott did that in his first two stories; the emotional pitch in the later episodes was exclusively pathos and it became tiring. The major theme of The Corrida at San Feliu is the relationship between an older man and a younger woman and, perhaps, the action of the corrida was symbolic of that. I found it too great an effort to mine that lode; it seemed just a tedious digression (a comment about prose style).

My five aspects of the novel is, by my own admission, a work of genius, but it too may be flawed. Where do we stick the observation about humor and pathos? Story element? Story structure? Story? Hmm. Prose style? Hmm.

Being a flawed genius covers a host of sins; I think I'll like it. Where's my pipe? It's easier being a poseur if you've got props.