Sudden Death: A Novel

By Alvaro Enrigue and Natasha Wimmer

"Splendid" —New York Times
"Mind-bending." —Wall Street Journal
"Brilliantly original. The best new novel I've read this year." —Salman Rushdie

A daring, kaleidoscopic novel about the clash of empires and ideas, told through a tennis match in the sixteenth century between the radical Italian artist Caravaggio and the Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo, played with a ball made from the hair of the beheaded Anne Boleyn.

The poet and the artist battle it out in Rome before a crowd that includes Galileo, a Mary Magdalene, and a generation of popes who would throw the world into flames. In England, Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII execute Anne Boleyn, and her crafty executioner transforms her legendary locks into those most-sought-after tennis balls. Across the ocean in Mexico, the last Aztec emperors play their own games, as the conquistador Hernán Cortés and his Mayan translator and lover, La Malinche, scheme and conquer, fight and f**k, not knowing that their domestic comedy will change the course of history. In a remote Mexican colony a bishop reads Thomas More’s Utopia and thinks that it’s a manual instead of a parody. And in today’s New York City, a man searches for answers to impossible questions, for a book that is both an archive and an oracle.

Álvaro Enrigue’s mind-bending story features assassinations and executions, hallucinogenic mushrooms, bawdy criminals, carnal liaisons and papal schemes, artistic and religious revolutions, love and war. A blazingly original voice and a postmodern visionary, Enrigue tells the grand adventure of the dawn of the modern era, breaking down traditions and upending expectations, in this bold, powerful gut-punch of a novel.

Game, set, match.

“Sudden Death is the best kind of puzzle, its elements so esoteric and wildly funny that readers will race through the book, wondering how Álvaro Enrigue will be able to pull a novel out of such an astonishing ball of string.  But Enrigue absolutely does; and with brilliance and clarity and emotional warmth all the more powerful for its surreptitiousness.” 
—Lauren Groff, New York Times-bestselling author of Fates and Furies

"Engrossing... rich with Latin and European history." —The New Yorker

"[A] bawdy, often profane, sprawling, ambitious book that is as engaging as it is challenging.” —Vogue

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
• Release date: Feb 9, 2016
• ISBN: 9780698179035

Alvaro Enrigue

Álvaro Enrigue (México, 1969) ganó el Premio de Primera Novela Joaquín Mortiz en 1996 con La muerte de un instalador. En Anagrama ha publicado Hipotermia: «Relatos de gran altura y fascinante originalidad» (J. A. Masoliver Ródenas, La Vanguardia); «No es uno de esos falsos libros de cuentos que circulan por ahí disfrazados de novelas, pero tampoco una novela convencional; es un libro anfibio por naturaleza» (Guadalupe Nettel, Lateral); Vidas perpendiculares: «Excelente novela... Creo que la estrategia narrativa de este inteligentísimo autor culmina en unas páginas de un poder arrasante» (Carlos Fuentes); Decencia: «Actualiza las novelas mexicanas de la Revolución y les devuelve una ambición no exenta de ironía y desencanto» (Patricio Pron, El País); «Una escritura que apunta a Jorge Luis Borges, a Roberto Bolaño, a Malcolm Lowry y a Carlos Fuentes, aunque la región de Enrigue nada tenga de transparente» (Mónica Maristain, Página/12); Muerte súbita (Premio Herralde de Novela 2013): «Espléndida novela para tiempos de crisis» (Jesús Ferrer, La Razón); «Una novela a la altura de su desmesurada ambición. Se le exige mucho al lector y, como compensación, se le da lo mucho que promete» (J. A. Masoliver Ródenas, La Vanguardia); «Es posible que sea también un divertimento histórico sobre hechos contados muy libremente y un ensayo ficción sobre en qué cosa se puede convertir algo tan moldeable como es la novela» (Ricardo Baixeras, El Periódico); Ahora me rindo y eso es todo: «Una obra ambiciosa, en la que se mezclan géneros diversos... Una novela total» (Diego Gándara, La Razón); «Una ambiciosa novela total» (Matías Néspolo, El Mundo); «A García Márquez y Carlos Fuentes les hubiera gustado este exuberante alumbramiento de fantasía, exploración y conocimiento» (Tino Pertierra, Mercurio), y el ensayo Valiente clase media. Dinero, letras y cursilería.

Book preview

Cover for Sudden Death

RIVERHEAD BOOKS

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

375 Hudson Street

New York, New York 10014

First published in Spain in 2013 by Anagrama, as Muerte súbita

Copyright © 2013 by Álvaro Enrigue

English translation copyright © 2016 by Natasha Wimmer

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

eBook ISBN 978-0-698-17903-5

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Version_1

For La Flaca Luiselli

For the three Garcías: Maia, Miqui, Dy

For Hernán Sánchez de Pinillos

CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

First Set, First Game

Rule

Beheading

On the Nobility of the Game of Tennis

First Set, Second Game

Soul

The Boleyn Balls

In a New World and Land

First Set, Third Game

Throat-slit

The Ball on the Right Is the Holy Father

Game to the Editor

First Set, Fourth Game

Tennis, Art, and Whoring

Game to the Author

The Testament of Hernán Cortés

La Vermine Hérétique

Cortés’s Coat of Arms

Giant Heads

Changeover

Admiralships and Captaincies

Paradise

Flight to Flanders

The Banker and the Cardinal

Second Set, First Game

Middle Class

Weddings

A Council Is Wagered and Won

Ball Games and the Ancients

Giustiniani’s Studiolo

Second Set, Second Game

Te Deum amid the Ruins

No Catgut for Spain

The Second Burning of Rome

Miserliness

On Names, and the Troubled History and Politics of How Things Are Named

Judith Beheading Holofernes

Second Set, Third Game

Ball Game

The Next World

Art

Regarding Most Popes’ Utter Lack of a Sense of Humor

Light to the Living and Lessons from the Dead

Fear

The Calling of Saint Matthew

The Chase

Ball

Treasury of the Castilian or Spanish Language

The Garden Academies

The Really Lousy Meeting of Two Worlds

Basket of Fruit

Iridescence

Third Set, First Game

Love That Doesn’t Speak Its Name

Ex

Theft

Priests Who Were Swine

Third Set, Second Game

Counter-Reformation

Exercitatio linguae latinae

Third Set, Third Game

Utopia

On the Causes of Poverty Under the Reign of Henry VIII

Third Set, Fourth Game

Encounter of Civilizations

The Emperor’s Mantle

Third Set, Fifth Game

On the Vestments of the Utopians

The Pope’s Peasant

Arte de la lengua de Mechuacán

Third Set, Sixth Game

Seven Miters

Sudden Death

Bibliographic Note

Acknowledgments

About the Author

The oldest written record of the word tennis makes no mention of athletic shoes; rather, it refers solely to the sport from which they take their name, a sport that—along with fencing, its near kin—was one of the first to require a special kind of footwear.

In 1451, Edmund Lacey, Bishop of Exeter, defined the game with the same suppressed rage with which my mother referred to the falling-apart Converse I wore as a kid: ad ludum pile vulgariter nuncupatum Tenys. In Lacey’s edict, the word tenys—in the vernacular—is linked to phrases with the acid whiff of court cases: prophanis colloquiis et iuramentis, vanis et sepissime periuriis illicitis, sepius rixas.

At the collegiate church of Ottery St. Mary, under Lacey’s rule, a group of novices had been using the roofed gallery of the cloister to play matches against townies. In those days, tennis was much rougher and noisier than it is today: some were attackers, others defenders; there were no nets or lines; and points were won tooth and nail, by slamming the ball into an opening called a dedans. Since it was a sport invented by Mediterranean monks, it had redemptive overtones: angels on one side, demons on the other. It was a matter of death and the afterlife, the ball as allegory of the soul flitting between good and evil, scheming to get into heaven, Lucifer’s messengers waylaying it. The soul rent asunder, just like my tennis shoes.

The prickly Baroque painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, a great lover of the game, spent his last years in exile for having run an opponent through with his sword on a tennis court. Today, the Roman street where the crime was committed is called Via di Pallacorda—street of the ball and net—in memory of the incident. Caravaggio was sentenced to death by beheading in Rome and spent years living as a fugitive, from Naples to Sicily to the island of Malta. Between commissions, he painted terrifying scenes of beheadings in which he served as his own model for the severed heads. He sent the paintings to the pope or his agents as symbolic tribute, in the hope of being pardoned. At the age of thirty-eight, Caravaggio was at last granted a reprieve, and he was on his way back to Rome when he was stabbed on the Tuscan beach of Porto Ercole, by an assassin sent by the Knights of Malta. Though he was a master of the sword and dagger, just as he was of the brush and racket, syphilitic delirium and lead poisoning left him unable to defend himself. Sepius rixas.

A few years ago I attended one of the three hundred thousand book fairs held every week across the Spanish-speaking world. A local literary critic found me so intolerable that he decided to launch a jeremiad against me. Since he didn’t have the time or energy to read a whole book and take it apart, he wrote on his blog: How dare he appear in public wearing tennis shoes like that? Vanis et sepissime periuriis illicitis!

It’s no surprise that anyone possessing a modicum of authority should agitate against tennis, or tennis shoes. I myself often issue complaints, like bad checks, about my teenage son’s Adidas. We cling to our tennis shoes until wearing them on a rainy day is agony. Anyone in a position of power hates them, impervious as they are to their agendas.

When this book first appeared, in Spanish, a Canadian writer and very dear friend of mine told his father, who was wildly excited because he felt that fiction writing had yet to pay real tennis its due in the form of a novel. He doesn’t speak Spanish, but he is perfectly fluent in French and Italian, which makes him capable enough of reading a book written in my mother tongue, so he had a copy sent to him from Spain and read it with the help of a dictionary. I can’t imagine a greater honor for a writer, though I’m not sure my friend’s father liked the book. In an attempt to save me from my own imagination, he wrote me a six-page letter pointing out all the physical impossibilities and imaginary rules I had come up with to be able to say whatever this book says. The letter proves that the true art is reading, not writing, and it is a beautiful testament of loyalty: a friend of his son is a friend of his. Commenting on some sexual incidents described in the novel, he noted: Now I know why you and my son are friends. This is a statement of complicity. It tells me that if we knew each other, he would forgive my defects just as he does his son’s. And his letter is full of authority. Not the kind that comes with age or rank, since I’m well past forty and a father myself, but the kind that comes with firsthand knowledge. My characters are playing pallacorda, a game whose rules are unknown, but physical memory, a sense of how the real tennis racket feels in the hand and how a real tennis ball bounces, made my friend’s father file a claim in the name of all realism. But the only real things in a novel are the sequences of letters, words, and sentences that make it up, and the paper on which they’re printed. What they produce in a reader’s head are private and unique landscapes of objects in motion that have only one thing in common: they don’t exist. A game that is played in a novel has everything to do with that novel and nothing to do with reality. And even so, we tend to claim—as my friend’s father did—that certain things are to be believed and others not in this or that book. As if a ball dropped by a character could roll out of a book onto the floor, run up against our tennis shoes, and stop.

In the opening scene of the British Renaissance comedy Eastward Ho, an apprentice called Quicksilver makes his appearance wrapped in a cloak and wearing pumps—slippers with thick woolen soles that are the earliest forerunners of our tennis shoes. His master, troubled by what he sees as a sign that the young man is about to fall into the company of ruffians, gamblers, and assassins, lifts the apprentice’s cloak. From his belt hang a sword and a tennis racket. Another in a line of authority figures—mothers, fathers, critics, bishops, bosses—alerted to someone’s essential flaws by his athletic shoes.

When leather footwear begins to look shabby, we take it to the cobbler to give it the sad newness of faces worked over by a plastic surgeon. Tennis shoes are one of a kind: there is no fixing them. What value they have derives from the scars left by our missteps. My first pair of Converse met a sudden death. One day I came home from school and my mother had thrown them away.

It’s no coincidence that when speaking of someone’s death in Mexico we say he hung up his tennis shoes, that he went out tennis shoes first. We are who we are, unfixable, fucked. We wear tennis shoes. We fly from good to evil, from happiness to responsibility, from jealousy to sex. Souls batted back and forth across the court. This is the serve.

First Set, First Game

He felt the leather of the ball between the thumb, index, and middle fingers of his left hand. Once, twice, three times he bounced the ball on the pavement, spinning the racket handle in the grip of his right hand. For a moment he gauged the space of the court; his hangover made the midday sun seem unbearably bright. He took a deep breath: the tennis match that was about to begin was a contest of life and death.

Wiping the beads of sweat from his forehead, he rolled the ball again in the fingers of his left hand. It was a strange ball: very worn and much handled, a little smaller than usual, solid in a way that was recognizably French; it had a more hectic bounce than the balls filled with air that he was used to playing with in Spain. He glanced down and with his toe scraped the stripe of lime that marked the end of his side of the court. He would come down on his short leg just behind the line: this was the surprise factor that made him invincible with a sword, and perhaps—why not?—with a racket too.

He heard laughter from his opponent, who was waiting for the serve on the other side of the cord strung between them. One of the degenerates accompanying him had muttered something in Italian. At least one of them was familiar: a man with a jutting nose, red beard, and sad eyes—the model for the tax-collector saint in The Calling of Saint Matthew, proud recent acquisition of the church of San Luigi dei Francesi. Tossing the ball in the air, he shouted Tenez! and felt the catgut strings tighten as he lit into it with all his soul.

His opponent’s eyes followed the ball as it flew toward the gallery roof. It struck at one of the corners. The Spaniard smiled: his first serve was lethal, untouchable. The Lombard had rested too easy, so sure was he that a lame man could be no match for him. In the quick, shrill voice with which Castilians pierce walls and minds, the poet remarked: Better a cripple than a bugger. On the other side of the court, no one laughed at his joke. But from his spot in the roofed gallery, the duke watched with the sly smile of a great rake.

In time, the duke, the poet’s linesman, would become the Spanish statesman his title gave him the right to be, but by the autumn of 1599 he had done nothing but punish his body, sully the family name, worry his wife sick, and drive the king’s counselors to distraction. He was a stout, brash man. He had a round face, an almost comically pointy nose, grapefruit-seed eyes that gave him a mocking aspect even when he was in earnest, short curly hair, and an unconvincing beard that made him look more of a fool than he was. He was watching the match in the same scornful, sardonic way he did everything, sitting in the arcade under the wooden roof on which the ball had to bounce for a serve to be considered good.

The Lombard took the center of the court behind the baseline. He waited in a crouch for the bounce of the Spaniard’s serve. The gang of layabouts with him preserved a respectful silence this time. The poet served again, and again he won the point. He had put the ball almost on his own side of the roof, so that it fell nearly dead for his opponent. The duke called out the score: Thirty–love, though what he said was lof. The Italians understood perfectly.

Gaining confidence, the Spaniard dried the palm of his right hand on his breeches. He turned the ball in his left. He was sweating enough to give it backspin without needing to spit on it. It wasn’t the heat but the fever that afflicts those who have yet to recover from too much drink, landing them in a purgatory of shivers. He rolled his head from side to side, closed his eyes, and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. He squeezed the ball. It wasn’t a normal ball; there was something irregular about it, as if it were more talisman than ball. This, it occurred to him, was why his serves were unstoppable. When he took his turn on the receiving side and the ball returned to the hands of its owner, he would have to take heed.

He gripped the racket and tossed the ball into the air. Tenez! He hit it so hard that for the fraction of a second before his lame leg came down again, the earth seemed to turn more slowly. The ball bounced capriciously on the roof of the gallery. The Lombard stretched for it. The Spaniard tried to kill the return dead but didn’t manage it. The point continued: luckily for him, the ball struck one of the posts, and he was able to snag it on the bounce, driving it to the back of the court. It was a good save, but the maneuver took too long, and surprise was the only option he had for countering his opponent’s experience on the court. The Lombard found it simple to fling himself backward and hit a drive that the poet had no chance of returning.

Thirty–fifteen, cried the duke. The only responsible member of the Lombard’s entourage was his linesman—a silent and prematurely aged professor of mathematics. He walked onto the court to mark a chalk cross on the spot where the ball had bounced. Before he made the mark he turned to look at the Spaniard’s second. The duke shrugged in a show of indifference, agreeing that the cross was well-placed.

The poet didn’t return immediately to position. While the professor took his time with the marking, he went over to the gallery. He’s good, the duke said when the poet was near; you couldn’t hit a ball like that on your best day. The poet filled his cheeks with air and blew it out with a snort. I can’t lose, he said. You can’t lose, confirmed the duke.

The next point was long and hard-fought. The Spaniard had his back to the wall, returning balls as if besieged by an army. Move in, move in, the duke cried every so often, but each time the poet managed to advance a little, his attacker pushed him back. At a desperate moment, he had to curb a drive by turning his back on his opponent—a showy play, but not very practical. The Lombard got to the ball close in and drilled the wall again. The ball struck very near the dedans—if it had gone in, the artist would automatically have won the game. Thirty all, cried the duke. Parità, the professor confirmed. The poet hit a serve that struck the edge of the gallery. Inside and unreachable. Forty–thirty, cried the duke. The mathematician nodded serenely.

The next point was contested with more cunning than strength: the poet didn’t let himself be trapped, and he was finally able to force the artist to play a corner. On the first short ball he eliminated him. Game, called the duke. Caccia per Spagna, called the professor.

Rule

Tennis. Game of a likeness to handball. One player defends and the other attacks, then vice versa. If there is a tie, a chase will decide the defender and the attacker in the third round, which is called sudden death. On the serve, the ball must strike a slant roof along one side of the court, from which it drops and is returned. Tennis is also called pala, after the racket with which the game is played, which is made entirely of wood with a little net of tight-strung gut in the center. It is gripped by the handle and with it the ball is struck with violence and force. Tennis is scored by points, but he who hits the dedans wins a round and he who wins three straight rounds or four rounds divided wins the match.

Diccionario de autoridades, Madrid, 1726

Beheading

Jean Rombaud had the worst of all possible tasks on the morning of May 19, 1536: severing with a single blow the

Reviews for Sudden Death

[soylentgreen23 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A tour-de-force, expertly translated by Natasha Wimmer. But what is this story about? It's about tennis, most of all and also least of all, about royalty and the papacy, about Caravaggio and the Spanish conquest of the Americas. A summary of the book would run to almost the same length of the book itself, and so all I can do is to recommend you read it - you will not regret it.

[booklove2 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

History interspersed with an ancient tennis match between a painter and a poet.  It uses historical figures, but what happens within might not be truth (but what historical fiction book even IS 100% true?  It's not possible.)  Enrigue states a few times within the book itself that even he doesn't know what this book is about.  Though I do think Enrigue enjoyed writing this, even if he didn't know what it was supposed to do.  Maybe to "...name what is lost, replace the void with an imaginary archive." (page 125)  The book is probably more enjoyable for those of us who don't know much about these historical figures.  Even simply imagining that old tennis was played within churches and the aim was to hit the ceiling is a fun detail I hadn't previously known.  The detail is rich enough and bounces around enough for me to stay interested, even if I might not be making the connections I should be.  Though I admit, I did not see the point of the short e-mail chapters. 

*Book #136/322 I have read of the shortlisted Morning News Tournament of Books

[eavans-914612 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The book has an interesting take on what history is, and the stories that define it. I loved the author's lively and intriguing characterization of Caravaggio, and how he didn't shy away from the violent and sexual aspects that make him such a compelling person to meditate on. The weaving of the various storylines and interspersions of the author's process of writing, rather than being too experimental or annoying to me (which is often the case), was self-aware and novel. I just loved how unpretentious it was for such pretentious concepts.

[colligan · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

What an unusual, intelligent, funny, and memorable read. The author presents a story with multiple digressions which are so entertaining, they in no way distract from the larger story line. The author is disarming honest and consistently creative. A work not to be missed if the prospective reader is looking for something new, smart, and genre-bending.

[rocketjk · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a fanciful, inventive novel by Mexican writer Alvaro Enrigue about the twin seismic events in Western history of the Counter Reformation that sought to crush Protestantism under the weight of Inquisition and expulsion and the destruction of the Aztec Empire by Hernan Cortes and creation of New Spain which brought new wealth to Europe. The narrative mostly jumps back and forth between two scenarios. First is a whimsically rendered tennis grudge match played between the Italian artist Caravaggio and the Spanish poet Quevedo. Much is made over the rules of early versions of tennis, the differences in the composition of the balls, as well as the symbolic (and invented) detail of four tennis balls filled with the hair of Anne Boleyn, shorn just before her execution. Second is the progress of Cortes and his relationship with Montezuma, whose world he is about to destroy. The tone of almost all of this is deceptively light, often played for laughs. But the veil is often pulled back, the smile shown to be the grin of a death's head. For both focus also spins out from the tennis game to show us that nobles and religious figures who sponsor and support both artists--and those figures' forebears--men who can at the same time appreciate a revolutionary use of lighting in a painting and condemn thousands and thousands of people to death via the headman's axe and the pyre. The Aztec culture is identified as tyrannical and murderous, and the conflict between Cortes and Montezuma as resulting in a sea of misery and blood. With all that being true, how to reflect accurately how delightful a reading experience I found this? Let's go back to the start and speak of a novel fanciful, inventive slyly humorous and inventive.

[kylekatz · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

2019. I never would have suspected that I would love
a book about a tennis match between Caravaggio and
an obscure Spanish poet in the 1500s; and Cortes
colonizing South America, but it was so beautifully written
that it was a joy to read. There was sone bawdy, drunken
gay sex too.

[asxz-2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Super weird, but always entertaining. Not since reading American Tabloid by james Ellroy have I been forced to Google so many of the characters in a novel to discover if they were real or not. The storytelling is a little stop-start and the timeline is utterly jumbled, which can be challenging, but the overall effect s perfectly charming. There is also some remarkable breaking of the fourth wall by the novelist which emphasized the playfulness of the whole thing. Uncategorizable, but a delight nonetheless.

[thorold_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Rome, 1599. The painter Caravaggio and the poet Francisco de Quevedo are playing three sets of real tennis as a result of a challenge issued for reasons neither can quite recall, which must have had something to do with the number of bottles of grappa consumed last night. Their seconds are a well-known Pisan mathematician(!) and the Duke of Osuna, respectively, and the spectators in the gallery include some Roman low-life figures who have served as models for Caravaggio's most famous canvases.

That's the sort of premise for an historical novel that is hard to resist in anyone's hands, and it only gets more intriguing when we discover that Enrigue is not only telling us about the match and the players, but also brings in a lot of background about the cultural history of ball-games (there are a lot of balls in this book: knowing the way Spanish idiom works, you can be sure that not all of them are going to be the sort used in games) and a parallel story about Hernan Cortés and the conquest of Mexico. And a few other things...

This isn't a book you can sum up easily, and Enrigue clearly doesn't want it to be something you can reduce to a single key idea. The idea he playfully suggests when he asks himself what the book is all about, some 3/4 of the way in, is that history is all about the bad guys winning, but I don't think we're meant to take this as limiting. In many ways, the book reminded me of the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier and his theory that the baroque way of seeing the world was only made possible by European contact with America: Enrigue also wants us to see the possible Mexican influences on Caravaggio's painting (and remind us that the Mexicans also had their own ball-game rituals...).

Fun, and definitely a book to keep your mind agile, which I really enjoyed despite my normal antipathy to ball games of all kinds. I suspect that the real-life Quevedo, combative though he was, would have been somewhat averse to ball games too, with his notorious short sight and bad leg. But that's probably something we have to allow Enrigue under the heading of poetic licence.

I'm the sort of person who has trouble remembering the rules of modern lawn tennis; 16th century real tennis is infinitely more confusing, especially since the usual terminology of the game as played at Hampton Court or in Merton Street is mostly derived from obsolete French words, not always a good basis for following blow-by-blow descriptions in Spanish, but that doesn't really seem to matter much. This isn't a book about who wins and who loses, at that level.

[ridgewaygirl · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Carlo Borromeo annihilated the Renaissance by turning torture into the only way to practice Christianity. He was declared a saint the instant he died. Vasco de Quiroga saved a whole world single-handedly and died in 1565, and the process of his canonization has yet to begin. I don't know what this book is about. I know that as I wrote it I was angry because the bad guys always win. Maybe all books are written simply because in every game the bad guys have the advantage and that is too much to bear.

Describing what Alvaro Enrigue's odd novel is about is a thankless task. After all, when the author himself admits to not knowing what the book is about, how can the hapless reader (and I was very hapless) hope to write a tidy review? Sudden Death is structured around a sixteenth century tennis game between the Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo and the Italian artist Caravaggio. The novel ranges back and forth in time, from Hernán Cortés and the conquest of the Aztec kingdom to the Renaissance, amplified by comments and asides from the author, himself. There are tidbits on the history of tennis, a ton of history unfamiliar to this American reader and character studies of de Quevedo and Caravaggio. It's all very fabulous and unsettling.

It took me a while to settle into the rhythms and frenetic pace of this novel, but once I was there, I enjoyed it tremendously. It's a profane and heretical romp that leaves no historical figure unscathed. I had no doubt of Enrique's fierce wit or deep knowledge of the people and times he was writing about.

The popes of the Counter-Reformation were serious men, intent on their work, with little trace of worldliness. They put people to death in volume, preferably slowly and before an audience, but always after a trial. They were thoroughly nepotistic and they trafficked in influence as readily as one wipes one's nose on a cold day, but they had good reason: only family could be trusted, because if a pope left a flank exposed, any subordinate would slit his throat without trial. They had no mistresses or children; they wore sackcloth under their vestments; they smelled bad. They were great builders and tirelessly checked to see that not a single breast appeared in a single painting in any house of worship. They believed in what they did.

[randymetcalfe · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Start with a tennis match played at the end of the 16th century. Back when tennis was a very different game. But the intent was still the same — to win. On this occasion the competitors, the artist Caravaggio and the poet Francisco de Quevedo, are playing in lieu of fighting a duel. Or maybe this is still a duel because it looks as though the match will be the death of at least one of them. Structured around the games of a three-set match, the novel ranges far and wide. As far as the conquest of Mexico, the beheading of Anne Boleyn, the tension between the Renaissance and the emerging Baroque, across genders, sexual orientations, languages, political maneuverings, and whatever it is that triggers Caravaggio’s turn to iridescence in his paintings. And throughout, hovering, the intrusive voice of the author, referencing his research, his exchanges with his publishing house, and his considerations on the significance of linguistic and stylistic flourishes.

In the hands of a lesser author, this might have been a recipe for disaster. But Álvaro Enrigue is clearly a master. He deftly handles the many balls that he has placed in the air, juggling them with ease, and turning even the most sceptical reader into a believer. An impressive feat, surely. And highly recommended.

[carlitabay · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I had a tough time getting through this book. So much of it was so crude, vulgar and sexist. There were a lot of historical details to look up and I did learn quite a bit about Caravaggio and Quevedo but I'm not sure which are historically accurate and which are just the author's imagination. I felt lost a lot and that tennis match was interminable! I feel it is much too difficult to listen to the audiobook but that is available. Perhaps if I read it again I would get more out of it but I know I won't do it!

[bodagirl · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

"As I write, I don;t know what this book is about. It's not exactly a tennis match. Nor is it a book about the slow and mysterious integration of America into what we call "the Western world" ... Maybe it's just a book about how to write this book; maybe that's what all books are about. A book with a lot of back-and-forth, like a game of tennis." (pp. 203 - 204)

This quote sums up the book pretty well, it's a mash up of narrative scenes set in 16th century Italy where a tennis match is taking place between the Italian artist Caravaggio and the Spanish poet Quevedo and scenes set in New Spain between Cortes and Cuauhtemoc, which are then intermixed with excerpt from Renaissance texts describing tennis and other expositional passages on contemporary events.

Not my cup of tea.

Popsugar 2016 Reading Challenge | Task 6: A book translated into English

[dreesie-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

"As I write, I don't know what this book is about", p. 203.

I don't really know either, but I don't feel bad about it after reading that.

I learned a lot about random things: real tennis, 16th century Popes and bishop and cardinals, Mexican featherwork, Caravaggio, Cortes. Thanks you google and wikipedia for being there for me as I read. Mostly I guess the book is about various people in the 16th century. Is the tennis game an allegory? I have no idea, I am not good with allegories. What does this book mean? I have no idea.

[thornton37814 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is perhaps one of the most unusual books I have ever read. The setting is a tennis match between Italian painter Caravaggio and Spanish poet Quevedo. The game is being played with tennis balls made of Anne Boleyn's hair. The audience is filled with all sorts of persons, including Mary Magdalene, who is a bit out of her historical placement. Not all of the novel occurs at the match. We gain insights into the careers of both men. We are exposed to a dialogue between Enrigue and his publisher. Enrigue even admits he doesn't know what the novel is about in one place toward then end. Besides seeming to bounce from one thing to another, much as a ball does in a game of tennis, parts of the novel seem to work together. It is perhaps a bit more bawdy than my comfort level. Is Enrigue a genius and master of the novel, or is he a failure? Ultimately that will be for each reader to decide for himself. Opinions will be diverse. I did not find the novel to be one that could not be put down, but I did not dread resuming it either. My curiosity about where the author was going with the story kept me interested.