Sudden Death

by Álvaro Enrigue Narrated by Robert Fass

Overview

Sudden Death begins with a brutal tennis match that could decide the fate of the world. The bawdy Italian painter Caravaggio and the loutish Spanish poet Quevedo battle it out before a crowd that includes Galileo, Mary Magdalene, and a generation of popes who would throw Europe into the flames. In England, Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII behead Anne Boleyn, and her crafty executioner transforms her legendary locks into the most sought-after tennis balls of the time. Across the ocean in Mexico, conquistador Hernán Cortés and his Mayan translator and lover, La Malinche, scheme and conquer, not knowing that their domestic comedy will change the world. And in a remote Mexican colony a bishop reads Thomas More's Utopia and thinks that instead of a parody, it's a manual.



In this mind-bending, prismatic novel, worlds collide, time coils, traditions break down. There are assassinations and executions, hallucinogenic mushrooms, utopias, carnal liaisons and papal dramas, artistic and religious revolutions, love stories and war stories. A dazzlingly original voice and a postmodern visionary, Álvaro Enrigue tells a grand adventure of the dawn of the modern era in this short, powerful punch of a novel.

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times - Larry Rohter

…droll and erudite…With all of [the] undercurrents and subterranean connections, Sudden Death might seem Pynchonesque but for its tone, which is mischievous and picaresque rather than paranoid and foreboding. For Mr. Enrigue, unlike for Marx, history doesn't repeat itself "the first time as tragedy, then as farce": Instead, history is imbued with farce even in the first go-round…This playfulness extends to the novel's form and language…[Enrigue's] approach has both great entertainment value and intellectual appeal, especially as a corrective to a Eurocentric view of history…Sudden Death is a splendid introduction to Mr. Enrigue's varied body of work…

From the Publisher

"[T]he reader can get lost in the profusion of historical figures." ---Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher - AUDIO COMMENTARY

"[T]he reader can get lost in the profusion of historical figures." —Publishers Weekly

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170863396
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	02/09/2016
Edition description:	Unabridged

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