Andy Thibault

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He Tilts At Windmills, This Writer Of Prose
By ANDY THIBAULT
Norwich Bulletin
Sunday August  21, 2005

I met a bold man tilting at windmills. Strange thing is, he won.

He's an outdoorsman and a swashbuckling novelist possessing a rare combination of delusions and the guts to make them real. I was drawn to Mark Sundeen not merely because he turned an opportunity into a dilemma - a substantial advance to write a book about bullfighting in Spain. I like the way he dealt with the challenge.

Before the advance arrived, Sundeen, aspiring to be a rafting guide on the Colorado River, became a master at emptying voluminous portable toilets from the large crafts.

Somehow I was not shocked upon learning he created the challenge by spending virtually all the advance money up front - before he might, for example, have gone to Spain. What, then? I asked a Connecticut Gold Coast lawyer versed in the publishing racket.
"Expect to pay back the money, get a revised schedule or become a defendant," said attorney Alan Neigher of Westport. "Hemingway did this all the time. I think that's how he paid for the boat in Cuba, but his publisher was very patient."

Sundeen beat the odds a different way. I think he went to the well with Don Quixote de la Mancha, who advised: "I know who I am, and who I may be, if I choose."

Good counsel from one character to another, as it turned out. Whereupon, with barely a dint of research, Sundeen spit out a couple hundred fast-moving pages: "The Making Of Toro - Bullfights, Broken Hearts, And One Author's Quest For The Acclaim He Deserves."

On its face, Toro recounts the adventures of Sundeen's alter-ego / adventurer / author Travis LaFrance, who - unable to pay for a trip to Spain - produces a book ostensibly about Mexican bullfighting. Simon &Schuster went for it.

"I went to Mexico not for bullfights, but for women, to irrigate the narrative with a steady flow of romance," Sundeen tells readers of Toro.

What follows is a Quixotic journey of unconsummated love, recalling The Man of La Mancha's illusory vision of Dulcinea. Travis LaFrance "snares a sophisticated babe in the Slovak photojournalist Hannah Kjoprczak … she tells of her hungry years in the Prague underground and how her critiques of U.S. imperialism have made it difficult to get working papers …"

An erotic tension is envisioned between the brainy dissident and our hero, "as primal as the dance between man and bull, reaching a conclusion equally lyrical and inevitable atop the starched white sheets of Los Amantes Motor Lodge in downtown El Centro."

Hannah is not exactly a journalist, but she does work in a darkroom. And the climax, well, is nice - but not what our hero had been seeking.

Oh, the bullfighting. There isn't much of it in this book. And, it's not quite real bullfighting. Not much of anything happens. It's just great writing. There is a reverence for Hemingway and at the same time a sense of the hollowness of a macho life.

Sundeen, known for his gonzo collection of travel misadventures, "Car Camping," also worked as a writer and blogger for the Howard Dean presidential campaign. He is in Connecticut a few weeks a year, as a writer in residence for the MFA program at Western Connecticut State University in Danbury.

As to the towering achievement of "The Making Of Toro …," the late Hunter S. Thompson remarked, " Books like this are only written once or twice in a century. Thank God."

How can I fail to agree?

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