Juan Belmonte, Killer of Bulls

This one is a genuine hidden classic. It's an as-told-to autobiography: the great Spanish journalist Manuel Chaves Nogales sat with Belmonte and wrote his life in the first person (Juan Belmonte, matador de toros, 1935; the English translation — done, wonderfully, by Leslie Charteris, the creator of The Saint — appeared in 1937 as Juan Belmonte, Killer of Bulls).

The material is almost implausibly good. Belmonte grew up poor in Triana, the flamenco quarter across the river from Seville, and learned to fight as a teenager by swimming the Guadalquivir at night with his friends to trespass on bull-breeding ranches — fighting the animals naked in the dark, because clothes would be evidence and moonlight was the only arena lighting they had. From there it follows him into the invention of modern bullfighting: Belmonte was ungainly, weak-legged, physically wrong for the job, so instead of dancing away from the bull he stood still and made the bull move around him — which experts initially called suicide and then called the revolution. The rivalry with Joselito, the golden age they shared until Joselito died in the ring in 1920, the fame, the strange melancholy of surviving — all of it is told with a dry, fatalistic Sevillian wit that reads like a novel.

Its reputation among people who know it: the best book ever written about bullfighting, and one of the best 'as-told-to' books ever written about anything — Chaves Nogales was a superb liberal journalist (exiled by the Civil War, died in London in 1944, hugely rediscovered in Spain in the 2000s), and his prose is why the book outlives its subject's sport. It pairs eerily with The Sun Also Rises, too: the aging Belmonte that Hemingway sketches at the 1925 feria is the same man who, ten years later, sat down and out-narrated everyone.

It begins across the river. Triana, Seville's flamenco quarter, the 1890s: Juan Belmonte is the small, sickly son of a shopkeeper, wrong in every physical particular for the only ambition available to a poor Andalusian boy. The famous early chapters follow him and his gang swimming the Guadalquivir at night to trespass on the bull-breeding ranches — capework by moonlight, naked because clothes left evidence — an apprenticeship conducted entirely in the dark, against the law, with animals that could kill them.

The revolution follows from the body he was stuck with. Too weak-legged to dance away from the bull like the classical masters, Belmonte stood his ground and made the bull do the moving — breaking the sport's oldest safety rule, working inside the animal's terrain, and turning what the experts called suicide into the foundation of modern bullfighting. One fights as one is, runs his famous aphorism, and the book is that sentence enacted: the deficiencies becoming the style, the style becoming the age. Fame arrives like weather — the alternativa, the mobbed seasons, the rivalry with the god-like Joselito that split Spain into two congregations and burned both men through a hundred corridas a year.