‘Matadora’ by Elizabeth Ruth

Reviewed by Rachel Carlson

Ambition, death, longing, and grief offer a powerful emotional through-line in Elizabeth Ruth’s third novel, Matadora, while paradox, ambiguity, and ambivalence draw us into a richly engaging plot. At the famed estate of the García family in Andalucía, Spain a young girl named Luna burns with ambition. Driven to escape poverty and servitude Luna knows that bullfighting is not only her calling, but also her reconciliation with mortality. To avoid a peasant’s fate and death like that suffered by her mother, Luna partners with unlikely allies to realize her goal. Manuel García, Don García’s eldest son and unlikely heir, agrees to train and support Luna. Manuel’s brother, Pedro, with his own ambitions for money and power also joins the fray. As politics and desire emerge in the plot a complex exploration of human contradiction and transformation unfolds. With only minor flaws, Ruth delivers an eloquent and haunting work that will leave readers unsettled yet satisfied.

Ruth’s novel requires a small degree of patience that will afford deeply satisfying returns. The opening sequences of the text are clumsy at times with almost archetypical characters—the rebellious but ambitious heroine, Luna; the misunderstood poet, Manuel—and with some awkward phrasing that interrupts enjoyment of the text. The imagery, for instance, is sometimes confused with phrases such as “today she’ll lift her feet from the stony equator, soar with the birds chained so magically to the sky.” Yet persisting with the novel we learn that while the imagery can be contradictory, it is indeed apt. Accordingly, as the text grows in complexity we are shown that striving for freedom can mean exchanging one prison for another. As the cover art suggests, our heroine gazes with longing and expectation into the bullring, naïve about the potential prison it circumscribes.

Moreover, Ruth’s characters develop just as children might, with simplicity of belief and perspective transforming into ambivalence and ambiguity. Consequently, Ruth is able to engage readers on an emotional plane. In particular, the text captures the heart-rending implacability of human sorrow, while the excess of human grief and loss remains present in the text like an uncanny ghost. As her friend Marisol grieves the loss of her baby, for instance, Ruth recounts that “for the next few weeks, the long, empty wail of her despair filled the hotel suite, as if it was the cry of the future, warning them all of what was to come: unmistakable sorrow, sorrow with its ugly endless echo.”

Throughout Matadora, readers can expect to have their hearts broken, but the author occasionally overextends her influence on how the novel makes meaning for readers. As though Ruth does not trust us to draw our own conclusions, she spells out the text’s significance; for example, when one character dies she explains that the death “marked the end of [Luna’s] childhood, and any lingering innocence.” Admittedly, as a reviewer I am alert to my critical voice making such foibles somewhat exaggerated, but as a casual reader I enjoy the freedom of interpreting the significance and mystery of the text for myself.

While the novel is not entirely seamless, it beautifully explores the tensions between tradition and modernity, cruelty and compassion, and dichotomy and continuum. By authoring a historical narrative with a female protagonist, Ruth emphasizes gender inequity that is couched in the language of tradition. Luna’s entrance into bullfighting challenges an established order of male dominance. Simultaneously, the prospect of modernity emphasizes the interplay of gender and class oppression because “bullfighting was the ultimate aristocratic conceit, it represented the class tradition that starved so many, and had once impoverished her… what had once been a radical, progressive ambition now made her feel like a traitor to her class.”

Demonstrably, Ruth is honest in her challenges to oppressive societal norms using ambivalence and paradox to recount the dialectical relationship between resistance and containment. Significantly, in her “Note to Readers” the author acknowledges her intent to explore gender normativity, yet denies that her work is concerned with “whether bullfighting ought to be permitted.” Given the current hostility towards bullfighting the novel must necessarily be concerned with questions of animal cruelty and—dare I say—oppression. Indeed, Ruth does explore this loaded topic without conceding a moral conclusion, leaving readers to explore the contradictory messages the novel offers on the topics of cruelty and compassion.

Additionally, the author does not shy away from sexual politics in the novel, but rather, she emphasizes them from within the tensions between tradition and modernity. Ruth presents sexual identity and pleasure as existing along a continuum that defies traditional notions of dichotomous sexuality. Indeed, her protagonist, Luna, presents a genuine emotional and erotic desire to connect in same sex relationships and to be “unburdened by the weight of tradition.” With great integrity and authenticity, Ruth gives credence and historical weight to narratives of pansexuality that work to challenge historical (and contemporary) notions of a simple and universal (gay—straight) sexual dichotomy.

Simultaneously, Ruth presents an authentic literary experience of a specific cultural and historical moment. Effortlessly, the author details the tools and the techniques of the corrida—the bullfight—as they are experienced by a Spanish woman of the underclass in the 1930s. Nowhere in the text is there evidence of historical or cultural pedagogy, but rather as readers we organically become either aficionados—conversant fans of the brutal art of bullfighting, or antitaurino—active opponents of a barbaric tradition. Likewise, the details of the Spanish Civil War are introduced gradually with the political tensions between right and left—fascism and socialism—skirting the edges of the plot. But the brutality of the war emerges fully to irrevocably transform the characters in realistic ways that enhance, rather than disrupt, the narrative’s verisimilitude. Indeed, the author uses factual details to effectively draw us deeply into her fiction. For instance, Ruth interestingly captures a unique Canadian involvement in the Spanish Civil War with the introduction of Norman Bethune—Doctor Blood—who served as a physician for the socialist forces.

While Ruth’s novel is occasionally awkward and over determined, it offers an emotionally and culturally complex pleasure. Ultimately, readers can expect intellectual and emotive challenges that are historically situated, yet utterly contemporary. Powerful and thought-provoking, Matadora may be worth not just one, but multiple, reads.

Cormorant | 320 pages |  $21.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-1770862081