Álvaro EnrigueRezensionen

So, Cortez is in Tenochtitlan, and there's a whole lotta colonialism going on. But things are also super trippy and expansive. Cities are floating, hallucinogenic mushrooms are in the water supply, and Monteczuma is absolutely rockin' it. I normally have a somewhat difficult time reading books without quotation marks for dialogue and You Dreamed of Empires was no exception to this, but GOD DANG this book rules so much.

Going to have to give this one up. The title is apt; there's something cold about the stories I did get through, and I want and need to move on to other things.

This would be a choice for the end of the year once it’s out in paperback. I heard the interview with the author on an NPR showthat was followed by discussion . Historical novel set in 1519 in what is now Mexico City. The clash between Aztec civilization and the Spanish conquistadors is richly detailed narrative by an award winning Mexican writer. 240 pp. Luba

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?"

As a lover of historical fiction to was anxious to read this especially since it told a story much different than much of the European history. I can say I was easily pulled into the story in spite of the many many strange words and especially names. The author does a great job of imagining the setting - the colors, the smells (many and mostly offensive), the sounds.

The story is told from the viewpoint of a member of Cortez' army - a man who has helped finance the expedition first to explore and then later to colonize. There are two interpreters: a former priest and a young woman who becomes Cortez whore (maybe the word). Then it gets just plain weird - all of a sudden the reader comes across a modern day British singer and his band TRex (which I had to look up as I've never heard of both). There is humor, there is some history, but then I realize I'm reading some sort of satire. Unusual to say the least.

I've been on a lovely roll with books lately, and Álvaro Enrigue's You Dreamed of Empires is keeping my winning streak going. You Dreamed of Empires is an imaginative recounting of single day: the day when Hernán Cortés met Moctezuma. Since actual accounts of that event are pretty much nonexistent, Enrigue gives himself permission to create his own truth about that day. This works well in two ways.

First, it means readers, even if they know the "standard" story of Moctezuma and Cortés, don't have any sort of certainty. Enrigue will take his tale in the directions he chooses, which means a) this book continually surprises and b) it offers an interesting thought experiment of ways this meeting might have played out. Second, as the novel progresses, the narrator becomes more active. What begins as fairly straightforward story becomes richer as it probes the various chains of action that could have been possible.

You Dreamed of Empires was written in Spanish, and I so wish my Spanish were good enough that I could read it in the original. I kept experiencing tantalizing glimpses of what the Spanish must have read like. The good news is that the translation is brilliant. This is a book that makes use of voice, and Natasha Wimmer lets that voice expand in wonderful ways as the book progresses.

You dreamed of empires can be a quick read, but move through it slowly enough to let yourself savor it. Enrigue makes use of a good bit of Aztec vocabulary, which can make some monolingual readers feel a bit panicky. Read the introduction to the book (presented as a letter from Enrigue to Wimmer). Pay attention to both suggestions about pronunciation and also to Enrigue's notes on why understanding all this vocabulary does/doesn't matter. I tend to read at speaking speed, saying the words aloud in my head as I move along. This means I'm limited in terms of reading speed, but it has the benefit of letting me "hear" as my eyes move across the page. Finding my ways to pronounce those words (I did try my best to follow Engrigue's suggestions) and encountering them over and over again made the book seem accessible in a way it otherwise might not have.

Whether you buy it from your local independent bookseller or request it from your local library, this is a book you should keep an eye out for. I don't know quite how to say this, but I'll give it a go: beyond the story, the act of reading this text is transformative in ways that can carry over into the reader's viewing of the world.

I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via Edelweiss; the opinions are my own.

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.½

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).½

What an unusual, intelligent, funny, and memorable read. The author presents a story with multiple digressions which are so entertaining, they in no way distract from the larger story line. The author is disarming honest and consistently creative. A work not to be missed if the prospective reader is looking for something new, smart, and genre-bending.

A tennis match around 1600 is not just a tennis match (although one fun of the book are the historical tidbits about tennis and other ball games) but a match between Italy and Spain, between religion (Inquisition, intolerance) and humanism, between the old and the new world and the different cultural views, between power/greed/money/violence and everything against it. Confusing, complex and playing with language, this is definitely worth reading.

This is a fanciful, inventive novel by Mexican writer Alvaro Enrigue about the twin seismic events in Western history of the Counter Reformation that sought to crush Protestantism under the weight of Inquisition and expulsion and the destruction of the Aztec Empire by Hernan Cortes and creation of New Spain which brought new wealth to Europe. The narrative mostly jumps back and forth between two scenarios. First is a whimsically rendered tennis grudge match played between the Italian artist Caravaggio and the Spanish poet Quevedo. Much is made over the rules of early versions of tennis, the differences in the composition of the balls, as well as the symbolic (and invented) detail of four tennis balls filled with the hair of Anne Boleyn, shorn just before her execution. Second is the progress of Cortes and his relationship with Montezuma, whose world he is about to destroy. The tone of almost all of this is deceptively light, often played for laughs. But the veil is often pulled back, the smile shown to be the grin of a death's head. For both focus also spins out from the tennis game to show us that nobles and religious figures who sponsor and support both artists--and those figures' forebears--men who can at the same time appreciate a revolutionary use of lighting in a painting and condemn thousands and thousands of people to death via the headman's axe and the pyre. The Aztec culture is identified as tyrannical and murderous, and the conflict between Cortes and Montezuma as resulting in a sea of misery and blood. With all that being true, how to reflect accurately how delightful a reading experience I found this? Let's go back to the start and speak of a novel fanciful, inventive slyly humorous and inventive.

2019. I never would have suspected that I would love
a book about a tennis match between Caravaggio and
an obscure Spanish poet in the 1500s; and Cortes
colonizing South America, but it was so beautifully written
that it was a joy to read. There was sone bawdy, drunken
gay sex too.

The novel begins by telling you nothing in it is true:

the only real things in a novel are the sequences of letters, words, and sentences that make it up, and the paper on which they're printed.

But what follows is told in a tone that mimics the tone of a popular history book. Never mind that the historic characters who appear in this novel are set into scenes of great ridiculousness-- history itself is ridiculous series of unlikely events, isn't it?--so as I read sentence after sentence of implausible if historic-sounding details, each so surprising and specific (and playful and delightful), I kept thinking, "wait, did that really happen?" or "could it have been that way?" until I just needed to give myself up to the story entirely and to be carried off into its world.

And through it all, somehow this feeling kept surprising me, that I could be having so much fun while reading a book that is so erudite and so well-written. No matter how playful the novel is, there is this skittering tension in it between fact and fiction, between what is known about the past, and what can never be known about the past. It's both a deep-fun book, and a fun-deep book. Wonderful.

Super weird, but always entertaining. Not since reading American Tabloid by james Ellroy have I been forced to Google so many of the characters in a novel to discover if they were real or not. The storytelling is a little stop-start and the timeline is utterly jumbled, which can be challenging, but the overall effect s perfectly charming. There is also some remarkable breaking of the fourth wall by the novelist which emphasized the playfulness of the whole thing. Uncategorizable, but a delight nonetheless.

If you think you won't like this book because it's 'experimental' in the sense of not having a linear plot and being meta, set that aside and give it a try. For me this book hit so many fantastic notes - juicy characters, biting satire, sly humor, and underneath it all an absurdist pessimism toward human nature and history that doesn't quite slip into nihilism. The structure of the book - the jumping between the stories and the author's direct conversation with the reader - made it even more of a page-turner for me, I couldn't wait to return to all the story lines. The translator does an amazing job. Here's a couple of quotes that give a flavor of the author's voice - and are just as applicable to the 21st century as the 16th.

Describing Hernando Cortes: “...he wasn’t just Europe’s greatest celebrity but the prince of all those who fuck things up without realizing it. He’s the lord of the fight pickers, the litigious, those who can never acknowledge their own success; the captain of all those who win an impossible battle only to believe that it’s the first of many and then sink in their own shit with sword raised.”

Speaking to the reader: “There are few better illustrations of how 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.”

Book was over my head - cannot award it a rating.

Rome, 1599. The painter Caravaggio and the poet Francisco de Quevedo are playing three sets of real tennis as a result of a challenge issued for reasons neither can quite recall, which must have had something to do with the number of bottles of grappa consumed last night. Their seconds are a well-known Pisan mathematician(!) and the Duke of Osuna, respectively, and the spectators in the gallery include some Roman low-life figures who have served as models for Caravaggio's most famous canvases.

That's the sort of premise for an historical novel that is hard to resist in anyone's hands, and it only gets more intriguing when we discover that Enrigue is not only telling us about the match and the players, but also brings in a lot of background about the cultural history of ball-games (there are a lot of balls in this book: knowing the way Spanish idiom works, you can be sure that not all of them are going to be the sort used in games) and a parallel story about Hernan Cortés and the conquest of Mexico. And a few other things...

This isn't a book you can sum up easily, and Enrigue clearly doesn't want it to be something you can reduce to a single key idea. The idea he playfully suggests when he asks himself what the book is all about, some 3/4 of the way in, is that history is all about the bad guys winning, but I don't think we're meant to take this as limiting. In many ways, the book reminded me of the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier and his theory that the baroque way of seeing the world was only made possible by European contact with America: Enrigue also wants us to see the possible Mexican influences on Caravaggio's painting (and remind us that the Mexicans also had their own ball-game rituals...).

Fun, and definitely a book to keep your mind agile, which I really enjoyed despite my normal antipathy to ball games of all kinds. I suspect that the real-life Quevedo, combative though he was, would have been somewhat averse to ball games too, with his notorious short sight and bad leg. But that's probably something we have to allow Enrigue under the heading of poetic licence.

I'm the sort of person who has trouble remembering the rules of modern lawn tennis; 16th century real tennis is infinitely more confusing, especially since the usual terminology of the game as played at Hampton Court or in Merton Street is mostly derived from obsolete French words, not always a good basis for following blow-by-blow descriptions in Spanish, but that doesn't really seem to matter much. This isn't a book about who wins and who loses, at that level.

Carlo Borromeo annihilated the Renaissance by turning torture into the only way to practice Christianity. He was declared a saint the instant he died. Vasco de Quiroga saved a whole world single-handedly and died in 1565, and the process of his canonization has yet to begin. I don't know what this book is about. I know that as I wrote it I was angry because the bad guys always win. Maybe all books are written simply because in every game the bad guys have the advantage and that is too much to bear.

Describing what Alvaro Enrigue's odd novel is about is a thankless task. After all, when the author himself admits to not knowing what the book is about, how can the hapless reader (and I was very hapless) hope to write a tidy review? Sudden Death is structured around a sixteenth century tennis game between the Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo and the Italian artist Caravaggio. The novel ranges back and forth in time, from Hernán Cortés and the conquest of the Aztec kingdom to the Renaissance, amplified by comments and asides from the author, himself. There are tidbits on the history of tennis, a ton of history unfamiliar to this American reader and character studies of de Quevedo and Caravaggio. It's all very fabulous and unsettling.

It took me a while to settle into the rhythms and frenetic pace of this novel, but once I was there, I enjoyed it tremendously. It's a profane and heretical romp that leaves no historical figure unscathed. I had no doubt of Enrique's fierce wit or deep knowledge of the people and times he was writing about.

The popes of the Counter-Reformation were serious men, intent on their work, with little trace of worldliness. They put people to death in volume, preferably slowly and before an audience, but always after a trial. They were thoroughly nepotistic and they trafficked in influence as readily as one wipes one's nose on a cold day, but they had good reason: only family could be trusted, because if a pope left a flank exposed, any subordinate would slit his throat without trial. They had no mistresses or children; they wore sackcloth under their vestments; they smelled bad. They were great builders and tirelessly checked to see that not a single breast appeared in a single painting in any house of worship. They believed in what they did.

Start with a tennis match played at the end of the 16th century. Back when tennis was a very different game. But the intent was still the same — to win. On this occasion the competitors, the artist Caravaggio and the poet Francisco de Quevedo, are playing in lieu of fighting a duel. Or maybe this is still a duel because it looks as though the match will be the death of at least one of them. Structured around the games of a three-set match, the novel ranges far and wide. As far as the conquest of Mexico, the beheading of Anne Boleyn, the tension between the Renaissance and the emerging Baroque, across genders, sexual orientations, languages, political maneuverings, and whatever it is that triggers Caravaggio’s turn to iridescence in his paintings. And throughout, hovering, the intrusive voice of the author, referencing his research, his exchanges with his publishing house, and his considerations on the significance of linguistic and stylistic flourishes.

In the hands of a lesser author, this might have been a recipe for disaster. But Álvaro Enrigue is clearly a master. He deftly handles the many balls that he has placed in the air, juggling them with ease, and turning even the most sceptical reader into a believer. An impressive feat, surely. And highly recommended.½

I had a tough time getting through this book. So much of it was so crude, vulgar and sexist. There were a lot of historical details to look up and I did learn quite a bit about Caravaggio and Quevedo but I'm not sure which are historically accurate and which are just the author's imagination. I felt lost a lot and that tennis match was interminable! I feel it is much too difficult to listen to the audiobook but that is available. Perhaps if I read it again I would get more out of it but I know I won't do it!

"As I write, I don;t know what this book is about. It's not exactly a tennis match. Nor is it a book about the slow and mysterious integration of America into what we call "the Western world" ... 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." (pp. 203 - 204)

This quote sums up the book pretty well, it's a mash up of narrative scenes set in 16th century Italy where a tennis match is taking place between the Italian artist Caravaggio and the Spanish poet Quevedo and scenes set in New Spain between Cortes and Cuauhtemoc, which are then intermixed with excerpt from Renaissance texts describing tennis and other expositional passages on contemporary events.

Not my cup of tea.

"As I write, I don't know what this book is about", p. 203.

I don't really know either, but I don't feel bad about it after reading that.

I learned a lot about random things: real tennis, 16th century Popes and bishop and cardinals, Mexican featherwork, Caravaggio, Cortes. Thanks you google and wikipedia for being there for me as I read. Mostly I guess the book is about various people in the 16th century. Is the tennis game an allegory? I have no idea, I am not good with allegories. What does this book mean? I have no idea.

This is perhaps one of the most unusual books I have ever read. The setting is a tennis match between Italian painter Caravaggio and Spanish poet Quevedo. The game is being played with tennis balls made of Anne Boleyn's hair. The audience is filled with all sorts of persons, including Mary Magdalene, who is a bit out of her historical placement. Not all of the novel occurs at the match. We gain insights into the careers of both men. We are exposed to a dialogue between Enrigue and his publisher. Enrigue even admits he doesn't know what the novel is about in one place toward then end. Besides seeming to bounce from one thing to another, much as a ball does in a game of tennis, parts of the novel seem to work together. It is perhaps a bit more bawdy than my comfort level. Is Enrigue a genius and master of the novel, or is he a failure? Ultimately that will be for each reader to decide for himself. Opinions will be diverse. I did not find the novel to be one that could not be put down, but I did not dread resuming it either. My curiosity about where the author was going with the story kept me interested.½