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.
Enrigue, Alvaro. (2013). Sudden Death. New York: Riverhead.
