Hemingway’s masterpiece on Spain’s bull runs turns 100
start of the San Fermín festival, kicks off nine days of uninterrupted
festivities in Pamplona, Spain, on Monday. (AP)
PAMPLONA (SPAIN), July 6: Bill Hillmann has been gored three times while running with the bulls in Spain, but he wouldn’t miss this year’s San Fermin festival for anything.
It marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of Ernest Hemingway’s book The Sun Also Rises that launched the future Nobel Laureate to literary fame and put Pamplona on the map for millions of people around the world.
On Monday, the festival kicked off with a firework blast over a jam-packed plaza. The first of eight bull runs is on Tuesday.
Hemingway’s 1926 novella captivated generations of readers with its sexy Jazz Age tale of American and British bohemians trying to fill some inner void with the distractions of exotic travel, vast quantities of alcohol and the anguishing pursuit of impossible love.
Its success established The Sun Also Rises as a cornerstone of the American literary canon, right up there with F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. It also popularised the term “lost generation” to describe the tight-knit group of early 20th-century writers expatriated in Paris. Hemingway’s terse style forever changed American literature. In Spanish, its title is translated as Fiesta.
Hillmann, who hails from Chicago, was 19 when Hemingway’s vivid depiction of the bull running festival first enthralled him, especially descriptions of average Spaniards risking their lives sprinting through the streets to guide the bulls to the bull ring during the nine-day festival. It kicks off with a firework blast over a packed plaza on Monday, and the first of eight bull runs is on Tuesday.
“It was the first book I ever read,” Hillmann said in Pamplona as he looked down on the pen where the bulls are held before being set free on the cobblestoned route. “I sat there for about six hours, well past midnight, reading the book. And by the time I was done with that book, I was going to be a writer and I was going to be a bull runner.”
Since that literary encounter, the 44-year-old Hillmann has run with the bulls in Spain hundreds of times, counting both his trips to Pamplona and his participation in dozens more bull runs in other Spanish towns. His infatuation with Hemingway and Pamplona has never waned, even though he nearly died one time that he was gored by a bull horn.
Hillmann’s appreciation led him to earn a doctorate in English, and now it is his turn to teach The Sun Also Rises at East-West University in Chicago, and write about bull running. (AP)
