When I was young, I remember being deeply disappointed by Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass. This disappointment was not the fault of the story itself, but because its central conceit, a child’s adventure that doubled as a game of chess, was a failure. Specifically, the chess game was a failure. It makes no sense: white moves over and over again, a king fails to get out of check, the moves themselves are only barely part of a coherent plan.
Álvaro Enrigue’s novel Sudden Death is to tennis as Through the Looking-Glass is to chess. It’s not tennis in any recognizable or modern sense, not the tennis played by Roger Federer or described in ecstatic language by David Foster Wallace, although Wallace echoes the themes of Enrigue’s novel when he writes, “Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war.” The players in Enrigue’s novel are playing what’s now known as “real tennis,” an ancestor of today’s lawn tennis that I didn’t know existed until reading this book. Real tennis is the sort of game you would get if you played tennis on a racquetball court with a net, but only if the court was designed by the same person who designed Fenway Park.
The history of tennis isn’t the only thing I googled while reading Sudden Death. The novel is set in the sixteenth century, a piece of historical fiction that doubles as a game of real tennis. At the end of each chapter the read is propelled somewhere new and strange, across an ocean or out of the past to the present, over a net or against a wall, ricocheting erratically through time and space. There are dozens of characters, all based on historical figures of the European Reformation and the Spanish conquest of the Americas. Their actions more or less cohere to the historical record, with one major exception: the center of the story, the fictional tennis match between Francisco de Quevedo and Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio.
Enrigue’s method in writing historical fiction is to start in the middle and go backwards and forwards at the same time1. The tennis game proceeds, as it must, but we also have to go backwards in order to learn how everyone and everything got there, which somehow includes the hair of the beheaded Anne Boleyn, a scapular from Cortés’s new world adventuring, and Europe’s free fall out of the Renaissance and into the Reformation. It’s a novel a first and an encyclopedia second, but Enrigue’s urge to define and describe and move people around Europe is ever-present. Enrigue himself pops up in novel from time to time: we get to read some of his email exchanges with his editor (probably fictitious) and he tells us about the nuances of names in Latin America. He also admits that “I don’t know what this book is about,” which is not very reassuring, coming as it does near the end of the novel, until you remember that the Enrigue of the novel is a fictional representation of the author and not necessarily the author himself. It’s a slippery beast, this book.
So what’s Sudden Death really about? Take a long look at the painting below:
That’s a photograph of Caravaggio’s masterpiece Saint Matthew and the Angel, which, as Enrigue notes, was “judged intolerable by the clergymen: in it, the saint is presented as a befuddled beggar; an angel guides the hand with which he writes the Scripture. It was returned.” The reason that we’re looking at a black and white photograph rather than a full color image of the real thing is that the real thing was destroyed by allied bombing during World War II, an artistic casualty among the greater tragedy of that war.
Here the beauty of Caravaggio’s work2 is contrasted with the stupidity of war and destruction, a tension that exists throughout the novel: in the Spanish priests who destroy priceless Native American manuscripts, in the Pope who expects to see Rome burn as the Counter-Reformation begins. These are the villains of the novel. Enrigue reminds us that “a whole host of people can manage to understand absolutely nothing, act in an impulsive and idiotic way, and still drastically change the course of history.”
The good guys are the ones inspired to create beauty, inspired by a kind of religious feeling specific to the fevers and passions of the sixteenth century, but transcendent in a way that still speaks to us today because the beauty of their work is located in the real world. Enrigue explains this in a riveting passage:
Anyone who believes that earthly objects are all composed of the same group of substances, and that transformations are accomplished only by mechanical means, will naturally perceive the voice of God in the filthy fingernails—nails that are of this world, a part of history—of Caravaggio’s saints and virgins. The voice of a god more brilliant than capricious; a god unlike God, remote and uninterested in revealing himself in miracles beyond combustion or the balance of forces; a true god for everyone: the poor, the wicked, the politicians, the rent boys, and the millionaires.
Caravaggio was to painting what Galilei was to physics: someone who took a second look and said what he was seeing; someone who discovered that forms in space aren’t allegories of anything but themselves, and that’s enough; someone who understood that the true mystery of the forces that control how we inhabit the earth is not how lofty they are, but how elemental.
These forces—beauty, physics, war—exist in the world we inhabit; they also exist, in a way, in the game of tennis.
The language of great literature is the language of paradox. Here’s one such moment:
Descriptions of works of art, like descriptions of dreams, halt stories and sap their strength. A work of art can be part of the story only if it alters the line of history as it’s being drawn, and yet if a work of art, like a dream, is work remembering, it’s precisely because it represents a blind spot for history. Art and dreams don’t stick with us because they have the capacity to move things along, but because they stop the world: they function as a parenthesis, a dyke, a moment of rest.
This is a wonderful passage, but a challenging one, given that Sudden Death is fundamentally about art, repeatedly describing works of art and the process by which they were created. If we take Enrigue’s words at face value, then the works of art in this novel are moments of grace that interrupt the plot of the present, the tennis game itself. This leaves us in an interesting position: the art, which actually exists, is the dream state, while the tennis, which is fiction, is made real, at least a kind of looking-glass reality.
Enrigue steps in, either to save the reader or confuse us further, to state that his own novel, “Doesn’t aspire to accurately represent the time, but does want to present it as a theory about the world we live in today.” More paradox: the historical material of the novel seems reasonably accurate, and Enrigue does not confront the problems of the present moment directly.
In my opinion, Enrigue solves these problems by the end of the novel. He collapses time and space in such a way that we are left with transcendent beauty rather than death and despair, better off for the pauses along the way. And it’s a rough world out there in the sixteenth century, a time period that is deeply responsible for the world we live in today, as much as any century that came after it and more so than any before. I’m curious if all of Enrigue’s books are these strange historical phantasmagorias. I suppose I’ll have to wait until the next one is translated into English to find out.
This was also the case in You Dreamed of Empires, which I wrote about back in June.
It’s incredible, go back and look at it some more.