Sudden Death by Alvaro Enrigue 5/5

I read this book because I had the opportunity to attend a reading by the author.

He’s brilliant.

As the novel shows, he’s vastly erudite, and Sudden Death is the fruit of deep reading in history. It could almost be non-fiction, on the order of The Devil in the White City, except for the many imagined scenes. He goes too deep into the interiority of the characters to call it non-fiction. And invents too rich a tapestry of interwoven details.

It’s better that way. This is an author who you want to let soar. Give him free reign to follow his own way, and he’s guaranteed to show you something interesting.

If you have the American edition of the book, you may appreciate knowing this, which he told us during the Q & A. He adds chapters as new translations of the book come out. For instance, many of the characters take on different names at different times. This is common in Latin cultures, according to him. Why it happens is a mystery, and he includes it in the novel not despite but because of the mystery. But his British editor was afraid it would confuse Anglophone readers. She wanted him to include a name chart in the back.

Instead, for the same of organicity, he inserted the chapter “On Names, and the Troubled History and Politics of How Things Are Named”.

(He knows his book better than I do. Obviously. But I think it does more harm than good. A name chart would have put me, an Anglophone, on notice to watch out for name changes. He could have trusted his readers more. Let us dwell in a beautiful Mexican mystery that he admits he doesn’t fully understand.)

There was a wonderful moment I want to tell you about.

He read not from Sudden Death but from an upcoming novel which Natasha Wimmer is translating. What he read from is an early draft translation.

There’s a scene in which a woman runs across the prairie, fleeing some danger. Her clothes are too constrictive, so as she goes she strips them off. Unties her dress strings, loosens her corset, etc. Then this phrase occurs: “Without slackening her pace”.

Mr. Enrigue paused. He can speak English, but he didn’t know the meaning of this phrase. Think of that! What an odd consequence of translation. It must be a strange feeling to read your own words in a language you know, but not understand them.

Natasha Wimmer had done something very elegant. English imagines pace as a rope. Work is pulling or carrying, and taut ropes show a greater pace. Spanish seems not to have this. To ‘slacken the pace’ is such a cliche that most English readers won’t notice the poetic resonance with slackening the cords that hold her costume together. But we’ll feel its elegance.

One final thought, this about the novel Sudden Death itself. It’s wonderful to get into the history of tennis. I love how he brings out the connection between tennis and fencing. (Most U.S. writers think of it as more like boxing; but after reading this it seems like fencing is more accurate.)

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