Simon Casas's 'La Corrida parfaite' Chronicles José Tomás's Legendary Bullfight

Simon Casas's book 'La Corrida parfaite' (Au Diable Vauvert) is structured in three parts, mirroring the three tercios of a bullfight or a haiku. Its rhythm is driven by the perfect bullfight that occurred on September 16, 2012, in Nîmes, where José Tomás fought six bulls alone with astonishing grace, slowness, and creativity. This mythical torero remains an enigma due to his media discretion and total commitment, creating a depth of time that sculpts the bull's charge into an eternal masterpiece. Casas, a French torero turned artistic director of the Madrid bullring, writes with poetic suspension between two cities (Nîmes and Madrid), silences and conversations with writer Alain Montcouquiol, two identities (artist and entrepreneur), and fiction and reality. He navigates the bullfighting business with paradoxical rules of fiction, embodying an artist-entrepreneur or, as Fabrice Hyber would say, an art director. This gives his activities great innovative power and fragility, the price of loving life through the shadow of death. This fragility can be called duende, the singular inspiration from the body at work in dance, poetry, music, and bullfighting.