Book Review: Sudden Death

I picked up this book after seeing it in the Washington Post's 100 Best Books of 2016 list. I read the brief description and when I saw that the Italian artist Caravaggio was the main character, I knew I had to read it.

The author, Álvaro Enrigue, is Mexican born and lives in New York City. The book was translated (to the praise of many) by Natasha Wimmer. I made it through 40 pages before I decided to start from the beginning again. During that initial reading, I learned that this is not a book you can read without effort or attention. There are too many characters intertwined in seemingly unrelated ways and too much jumping back and forth to be able to read it without focus.

After starting the book for the second time, I was able to get a better -- though not great -- understanding of what was going on. The book jumps back and forth between a tennis match played by Caravaggio and Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo. The tennis match acts as an instrument for the author to offer his critique on the Counter-Reformation underway in Europe, which bred great political and cultural corruption and led to the demise of Christian values. Intermittently, the book jumps over to "New Spain" to offer a continued critique of history's unwanted conquistador Hernán Cortés and his rape of Aztec culture (and women). Though the Spanish conquest of Mexico occurs decades before the Counter-Reformation truly takes hold in Europe, as a reader you are led to observe the two at the same time and see the ugly truths of each period.

This book was a difficult read mostly due to the endless introduction of historical characters and difficult names that I couldn't remember. Additionally, the book references many works of art, and even though I am a lover of Caravaggio's art and have studied him a great deal, even I had to Google-image some of the paintings cited in book, and I was constantly Googling historical figures to remember who they were. I found myself rereading pages often and going through whole chapters with only a gist of what was going on. I was comforted on page 127 when I read, "These facts were confusing in their own time, and there's no reason why they shouldn't be confusing in a novel that doesn't aspire to accurately represent the time, but does want to present it as a theory about the world we live in today." The author does this periodically: inject a few lines or a whole chapter on what the book is trying to accomplish. I am of the mindset, though, that the work should speak for itself and the fact that the author needs to tell the reader that yes, this is a confusing read means that he didn't successfully find a way to plainly communicate the confusion of the period, which to me is indicative of mmm not-the-greatest writing or prematurely publishing the work.

All that said, I did enjoy (?) the book, despite its intentional (?) (and unintentional in trying to make it intentional) lack of clarity.