John Hemingway

Bacchanalia John Hemingway

Bacchanalia, A Pamplona Story is a novel that takes place during the Fiesta de San Fermin. It follows the activities of a group of expatriates as they live the nine day festival to its fullest, running with the bulls in the morning, watching the bullfights in the afternoon and in between drinking, partying, feasting, flirting and making love like there was no tomorrow. The characters are of different nationalities and backgrounds and each of them finds something unique in Pamplona. Frank is an Italian-American poet/house painter from Los Angeles, who keeps returning to the Fiesta year after year because the Fiesta first seduced him and then saved him from himself. Hector is Frank's best friend. He is a Mexican-American novelist from San Diego and an ex-Golden Gloves boxing contender who never went pro on account of his bipolar condition. He runs with the Spanish fighting bulls every morning because he is a Shaman (or a man of knowledge) and the bulls are for him a source of spiritual strength and enlightenment. Peter, another friend of Frank's, couldn't be more different from Hector. He is an ex-Navy Seal who was wounded in Afghanistan and who has discovered that running with the bulls helps him control his post-traumatic stress disorder. Clive is an upper class Englishman who flew with the Royal Air Force as a fighter pilot before he gave it up and moved to Spain to become a bullfighter. Ian is a hipster Scotsman with long blond hair and a beard braided with beads who sells derivatives in the City of London. He has a very un-politically correct, ribald sense of humor, which he uses as a way of breaking the ice with anyone he encounters. All of these men in turn are attracted to Irina, a young, stunningly beautiful, twenty-something, Russian temptress from St. Petersburg. She is visiting Pamplona and its Fiesta for the first time and everyone wants to have her. Everyone wants to be her boyfriend, to take her to bed or just to buy her a drink, but she is the one who decides, not the men. But perhaps the most important character in the novel is the Fiesta itself with its traditions and mysteries, its vitality and tragedy, its joy and almost bipolar duality between the spiritual and the pagan. It is an event that is forever changing and continually renewed by the millions of visitors who have embraced it and will embrace it in the years to come. It is the Bacchanalia, one of the few places left in the modern world where a man can take a chance and risk everything for love or a fleeting run with the bulls.