"The music started: two guitarists beating out more "Alboreas. "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.
"From the Hardcover edition."
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