Third reading: D.W. Buffa on "Death in the Afternoon"

D.W. Buffa was a criminal defense attorney for 10 years and his Joseph Antonelli novels reflect that experience. The New York Times called The Defense "an accomplished first novel" which "leaves you wanting to go back to the beginning and read it over again." The Judgment was nominated for the Edgar Award for best novel of the year. The latest Joseph Antonelli novel is The Privilege.

Buffa writes a monthly review for the Campaign for the American Reader that we're calling "Third Reading." Buffa explains. "I was reading something and realized that it was probably the third time that I knew it well enough to write something about it. The first is when I read it when I was in college or in my twenties, the second, however many years later, when I wanted to see if it was as good as I remembered, and the third when I knew I was going to have to write about it."

Buffa's "Third Reading" of Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon begins:

The unfortunate, if well-meaning, advice too often given to a new author is to write about what you know. It does not tell you how much you need to know or how you need to know it. Some things, important things, we learn by accident: the look of a girl passed on a street late one magical night in Manhattan, a girl we will never see again and, perhaps for that reason, will never forget. Some things we learn, or try to learn, on purpose. We go somewhere because it is the only place to discover what we think we have to find. It was the reason Hemingway went to Spain, to learn about bullfighting, something he thought he would hate but loved so much he wrote what is perhaps the greatest book ever written about it, Death in the Afternoon. The title itself seems to tell a story, four words that convey a sense of solitude and makes death seem an act of heroism and something to be proud of.

Hemingway was in his twenties, trying to write. He had been an American volunteer in the First World War, an ambulance driver in Italy. He was there, on the battlefield, whenever the fighting stopped, picking through dead bodies, looking for survivors. Death was all around him, but he did not yet know what he thought he needed to know.

“The greatest difficulty,” he insisted, “aside from knowing what you really feel, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced.” He was trying to...[read on]

About Buffa's new novel The Privilege, from the publisher:

Joseph Antonelli, who never lost a case he should have won and won nearly every case he should have lost, is about to see his client, Justin Friedrich, convicted for a crime he did not commit. His wife was found shot to death in the bedroom of their yacht in the San Francisco marina, and Friedrich does not have a chance. But then the real killer approaches Antonelli…

Famous and enigmatic, James Michael Redfield, the head of a high tech company that leads the world in the development of artificial intelligence, Redfield gives Antonelli evidence that proves Friedrich is innocent. But why did Redfield wait until the last minute to give Antonelli this proof?

Before Antonelli can even begin to solve that riddle, there is another murder, and Antonelli finds himself an unwilling participant in a conspiracy he does not understand. Antonelli has never known anyone like James Michael Redfield. Because for Redfield, it isn’t about murder at all; it is all about the trial. Because only a trial can show the world what Redfield believes it needs to know…no matter how many people need to die.

Visit D.W. Buffa's website.

Third reading: The Great Gatsby. 

Third reading: Brave New World.

Third reading: Lord Jim.

Third reading: Death in the Afternoon.

--Marshal Zeringue