Till Death Do Us Part
La vie à mort
“As the Andalusian sky darkens with cloud, the bulls in the meadow tussle, sometimes to their deaths. That’s where I met Léa Vicens. It’s also where our own push and pull began. She knew from the start that I don’t support bullfighting. But it was impossible for me not to like her. This book is my attempt to understand and embrace her world.”
For months, Gaël Tchakaloff followed the acclaimed bullfighter Léa Vicens in her everyday life, from la finca, the country ranch where she lives surrounded by animals, to the arena she rules over – a formidable figure on horseback.
What results is an immersion head-first into the high-paced, thrilling world of bullfighting and its complicated ethics, under Tchakaloff’s familiarly discerning eye. But it is also a detailed portrait of Léa’s reality as a woman intent on blazing her trail in a historically and culturally male-dominated profession.
More than merely an investigation into a cultural practice fraught with controversy, Till Death Do Us Part is an astonishing and deeply intimate account of one exceptional woman at the height of her talent, and her relationship to the sport she holds dear.