Sudden Death

In this award-winning novel, Mexican-born, New York-based Enrigue weaves history and speculation into several narrative threads, focusing primarily on three sets of tennis (substituting as a duel over a matter of honor) between the Italian artist Caravaggio and the Spanish poet Quevedo in 1599. A second stream aggregates a plethora of historical figures in a vivid re-creation of the intrigues and corruption of the Counter-Reformation, but Caravaggio, in many of whose paintings decapitation figures prominently, and Hernán Cortés command the most attention. The author also adds veracity by inserting essays about the history of tennis. Finally, Enrigue traces three topics throughout: four tennis balls made from Anne Boleyn's hair, a scapular extracted from the Aztec emperor Cuauhtémoc's skin, and a feather miter that a Nahuatl artist sends to the Pope. As the author admits in a metafictional aside, this is a "book with a lot of back and forth, like a game of tennis," with the title referring to both the outcome of this tennis match and decapitation as a method of swift execution.