Duende by Jason Webster

Duende by Jason Webster

The music started: two guitarists beating out more Albore s. The women took turns to dance in a frenzy, each trying to outdo the other. Deep Song always sings in the night, Lorca had written. It was the credo of the flamenco: a rejection of the mundane, the ordinary, the life of the everyday man, embracing, rather, an extreme world - extreme passions, extreme feelings, the extremes of life and death. And it was a way of life I wanted to believe in - its excitement, its danger, the affirmation it gave you that you were different, and alive.

Destined for a sedate and predictable life in academia, Jason Webster was derailed in his early twenties when his first love, an aloof Florentine beauty, dumped him unceremoniously. Loveless and eager for adventure - and determined to fulfill a secret dream -- he left Oxford and headed for Spain, the country that had long captivated his imagination, and set off in search of duende, the intense and mysterious emotional state - part ecstasy, part melancholy - that is the essence of Spain's signature art form: flamenco.

Duende is Webster's captivating memoir of the years he spent in Spain pursuing his obsession. Studying flamenco guitar until his fingers bleed, he becomes involved in a passionate yet doomed affair with Lola, a flamenco dancer (and older woman) married to the gun-toting Vicente, only to flee the coastal city of Alicante in fear for his life. He ends up in Madrid, miserable and lovelorn, but it's here that he has his first taste of the gritty world of flamenco's progenitors - the Gypsies whose edgy lives and fervent commitment to the art of flamenco vividly illustrate the path to duende. Before long he is deeply immersed in a flamenco underworld that combines music and dance with drugs and crime. After two years Webster moves on to Granada where, bruised and battered, he reflects on his discovery of the emotional heart of Spain.

Jason Webster was born in England and has resided in Spain for many years. Duende: A Flamenco Journey, Andalus: Discovering the Mysteries of Moorish Spain, Guerra: Living in the Shadows of the Spanish Civil War, Sacred Sierra: A Year on a Spanish Mountain, and The Spy with 29 Names are among his critically acclaimed nonfiction books on Spain. Or the Bull Kills You, the first in his Max Cámara mystery fiction series, was longlisted for the CWA Specsavers Crime Thriller Awards New Blood Dagger 2011. A Murder in Valencia, The Anarchist Detective, Blood Med, and A Body in Barcelona followed.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780767911665
ISBN 10	0767911660
Title	Duende
Author	Jason Webster
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Broadway Books
Year published	2003-03-18
Number of pages	328
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.