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

A great story told in a simple and colorful tone. Mark Sundeen is a great American writer who melds the classics with the modern. A tale of travel that envelopes the reader in characters and color.

Sundeen has done it again. This is another deep, multi-layered composition much like "Car Camping". It's very humorous book, but the best parts are when the narrator breaks through his veneer of self-delusion and discusses his true feelings. Whenever I read a book like this, I hope for one or two passages that will resonate within me and justify (in my head) my own experiences. This book is filled with them.

Cleverly plotted and well-executed, packed with dancing, ironic prose and endearing characters, Mark Sundeen's The Making of Toro was an excellent read. Fun, light and true, this short excursion across the border into Mexico's bullfighting culture had me bent over and sniveling with laughter. I smile to think of it.This book is an easy-going, comedic exploration into the sad impotence of modern American masculinity. Set against the backdrop of the bloody bullring and the grit of Mexico City, the reader sees what the protagonist himself is not able to recognize - that he is not his alter-ego Travis La France, the great bullfighter and irresistable romantic - that he is in fact simply an author and a man, accident-prone and lovable, trying to set the record straight about his misunderstood first novel, and doing his best to amend himself for being the man that he is, and not the man he would like to be.

"The Making of Toro" is one of those books (like, say, "A Confederacy of Dunces") that may not make much of a splash when it first appears, but that is destined to be passed from hand to hand and reader to reader until a small cult builds around it and its author. For starters, this book is flat-out hilarious. But it also marks the arrival of a writer who is bound to make a huge impact. Comparisons with Eggers and Sedaris aren't out of line: Sundeen blurs the line between memoir and fiction with the requisite postmodern relish. "Toro" is a tale told by a narrator so charmingly unreliable and self-deluded that we actually can't help rooting for him. But the writer Sundeen most resembles is probably Mark Twain (seriously!). In "Toro" (and in his earlier book "Car Camping"), Sundeen shows the same dry wit, the same trust that the reader will actually get the joke, and the same faith that sometimes the naive, deluded bumbler might see truths that more worldly types do not. And, like Twain, Sundeen conceals genuine depth beneath light humor. "Toro" begins as a comedy, but by the end it deepens into a surpringly poignant coming of age story. So buy this book--it's funny and original and thoroughly enjoyable--then pass it on.