The sort of post-modern historical novel that leads you to google the layout and rules of Renaissance era tennis courts and that makes Papal intrigues of the Counter-Reformation and the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire less interesting than they should be, while the author pops in to say "Hi, I have no idea what this is all about, and do you want to see a banal email exchange I had with my publisher?" ( )

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. ( )

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 ( )

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. ( )

La historia es una teoría del mundo actual.

The central motif of Sudden Death is a tennis match between Caravaggio and Francisco de Quevedo, performed as a quasi-duel resulting from a drunken homoerotic passo falso. Sudden Death presents a meditation on the end of the Renaissance, the Counter-Reformation (represented by Caravaggio's use of prostitutes to model the Magdalene in chiaroscuro), and the murder of Cuauhtémoc by Cortés (whose granddaughter married Quevedo’s associate, the 3rd Duke of Osuna). At the cusp of a complicated century, “the men who finally got their way were certain that they were breaking something they wouldn’t be able to put back together again.” Enrigue blurs the baroque and the postmodern in a kind of creation-myth; books, he says, are machines for understanding the way in which we name the world. A beautiful, brilliant novel. (Much credit to Natasha Wimmer for the translation). ( )