sudden death

Álvaro Enrigue's Sudden Death (translated by Natasha Wimmer) joins an exclusive club, namely that of works I'm jealous I didn't create.^[1]

It isn't exactly the same as being a favorite (though Sudden Death absolutely makes the cut there too) and it's certainly not true of all books that I consider especially skillful. Like, I adore Judith Herman's Trauma and Recovery, but I never could have written a book like that; it's simply too far out of my wheelhouse. I would have to be a fundamentally different person.^[2]

It's a weird, intense sort of appreciation, that comes from encountering something that I feel like I could have done if I were still me but did it better, with more skill and style. Sudden Death sits sort of at the edges of that, a little like Anne Carson's Nox does, because it relies on aspects of its creator's identity that I don't share: Enrigue is strongly influenced by being Mexican, Carson by the death of her older brother. But still, there's something in the approach that I recognize and wish I could accomplish, even if I don't wish to be a different person (and certainly count myself lucky not to have lost either of my brothers as Carson did hers).

It's a little hard to put my finger on what, exactly, Sudden Death is about, but I don't feel too bad about this, given that Enrigue takes a chapter in the middle of the text to explain that he doesn't really know either:

As I write, I don’t know what this book is about. It’s not exactly about a tennis match. Nor is it a book about the slow and mysterious integration of America into what we call “the Western world”—an outrageous misapprehension, since from the American perspective, Europe is the East. 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.

—Enrigue, Sudden Death, 203–04

If I had to explain it, I think the best way I can put it is how I did while trying to convince my friend Tell to read it, which is that it's about a tennis match between the painter Caravaggio and a Spanish nobleman that's about the history of tennis that's about the boundary between the Renaissance and the Baroque that's about the influence of native Mesoamerican culture on Europe that's about the personal in the political that's about gay sex that's about tennis.

It's a weird, weird book in an admirable sort of way, a confusing book that doesn't shy away from throwing a thousand names at your face and expecting you to keep up, but that rewards you for making the effort. It's well worth a read; I highly, highly recommend it.

1. Other members of the club include books like Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire, poems like Luke Kennard's "Mine eye hath play'd the painter and hath stell'd' (24)", and some of my grandmother's drawn threadwork embroidery.^{^}
2. I mean, for starters I'd have to be a psychologist, not to mention one brave enough to work with people who have suffered incomprehensible abuse and then to tell the truth about the nauseating ubiquity of that abuse, and I'll be honest, even reading the damn book took it out of me. My respect for Herman is enormous, but I certainly do not envy her her expertise.^{^}