Reviews of a number of the novels of Maia Wojciechowska contain phrases like 'a blatant failure', 'too blurred to be effective', 'succeeds only in tediously preaching', and 'the pretentiously allegorical parades of stereotypes'. These are hardly the sentiments to encourage readership and there is a sense in which Wojciechowska is her own worst enemy. It is not too fanciful to suggest that her personal life has been so exotic that she finds it very difficult to communicate with ordinary mortals….
It is a pity,… that two of [Wojciechowska's] novels from the 1960s are in danger of being lost. They are Shadow of a Bull (1964) and A Single Light (1968). Both are set in Spain. It is the Spain of the tourists and the guidebooks, of stark and barren hillsides, of paella and the muezzin cry of flamenco songs, of olive groves and hot sun. (p. 186)
There is much [of Ernest] Hemingway in the atmosphere of [Shadow of a Bull]. There are references to the killer of death in the bullring, for instance. Bracketed together in Manolo's education are Belmonte and Joselito, photographs of whom appear in fact on the same page in Hemingway's study of the Fiesta Brava (in Death in the Afternoon). There is a starkness and simplicity in the telling of Shadow of a Bull very reminiscent of Death in the Afternoon.
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