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

Mark Sundeen receives a call from a big city publisher with an offer to write a book about bullfighting in Spain.Sundeen agrees, assuming that this is his best and last chance to follow the trajectory of his literary heroes, despite the fact that he has never been to a bullfight, doesn't speak Spanish, and is not even a particularly good reporter.
After squandering most of the book advance, Sundeen can't afford a trip to Spain, so he settles for nearby Mexico. But the bullfighting he finds there is tawdry and comical, and there's little of the passion 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 Sundeen's idol, Ernest Hemingway. When LaFrance steps in, our narrator goes blundering through the landscape of his own dreams and delusions, propelled solely by the preposterous insistence that his own life story, no matter how crummy, is worth being told in the pages of Great Literature.
The Making of Torois a unique comic classic and a sly, poignant tale of the hazards of trying too hard to turn real life into high art.Mark Sundeenis the author ofCar Campingand lives in Utah.Chapter One

The news that I was to write a book about bullfighting came after a morning spent emptying tubs of human poo. You might think that in this age of talking toasters and the programmable toothbrush, science would provide a machine for this chore, but no: My only tools were gravity, scrub brush, and a garden hose. The plastic tubs were white and heavy like little ovens, cooking with the waste of twenty-five people who had just rafted for a week down the Colorado River. Beneath the seat was an opening big enough to insert your head, and on the ground where the poo had to go was a hole no wider than my fist.

Before becoming the author of an excelllãs