Sudden Death by Álvaro Enrigue review – a rich historical pageant

The religious and cultural forces of Europe’s golden age collide as Caravaggio duels on the tennis court

History is an eclectic matchmaker and places odd couples in bizarre situations: Seneca taught (or tried teaching) ethics to the young Nero; stout Cortés played chess with Moctezuma (Cortés won); Cardinal Spellman and Mae West were paired during a lifeboat drill in which the cardinal helped the film star into her life jacket; the priggish TS Eliot bickered with the ribald Groucho Marx over a display of photographs. Now we discover that the painter Caravaggio and the poet Francisco de Quevedo fought a duel under the guise of a game of tennis, an encounter that provides the core narrative of the Mexican writer Álvaro Enrigue’s new novel, brilliantly translated by Natasha Wimmer.

Sudden Death traces the convoluted story of the antagonism between these two men. Caravaggio, as is known, was the brilliant and irascible artist whose portraits of saints and other holy figures, which he modelled on prostitutes and beggars, kept his audience in a state of shock. Quevedo, as is perhaps not so well known outside the Spanish-speaking world, was an irascible and brilliant writer whose satirical prose and exquisite verse, written under the Inquisition’s vigilant eye, kept his audience in much the same state. Both were wanted for murder by the authorities and both died of a malignant fever. Quevedo’s last words were to a friend who asked him to leave some money to pay the musicians at his funeral: “Let those who enjoy the tune pay the piper.” We don’t know what Caravaggio’s last words might have been. The two men, however, stood at opposite poles: Caravaggio was an eccentric rebel, violent and anarchic; Quevedo was a conservative bigot, ambitious and supercilious. And all the conflicting forces of Europe’s golden age stood behind one or the other.

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