5 Questions with Álvaro Enrigue author of Sudden Death
Álvaro Enrigue was a Cullman Center Fellow and a Fellow at the Princeton University Program in Latin American Studies. He has taught at New York University, Princeton University, the University of Maryland, and Columbia University. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Believer, The White Review, n+1, London Review of Books, El País, among others. This novel — his first translated into English — was awarded the prestigious Herralde Prize in Spain, the Elena Poniatowska International Novel Award in Mexico, and the Barcelona Prize for Fiction, and has been translated into many languages. We asked him a few questions about Sudden Death, a wild story told through a tennis match between Italian painter Carravaggio and Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo, played with a ball made from the hair of a beheaded Anne Boleyn, and attended by guests including the likes of Galileo and Mary Magdalene. Surprising and visionary, Sudden Death explores the birth of the modern era.
- Thus far, two of your novels have been translated into English: Hypothermia in 2013 and Sudden Death just this year. Would you like to see your other novels translated? What are your feelings on translation in general — do you feel like anything ever gets lost?
Walter Benjamin used to think that languages expand their register thanks to translation, because translation forces ways of using words and structures that were alien to the original speaker of the target language. Borges made the case, many times during his life, for translation, and even erroneous translation, as the evolutionary force behind the great changes in literary discourses. Imagine if I disagreed with those titans: translation is the best way out of the comfort zone for our provincial writer’s and reader’s communities. Is reading translations how a writer can bring new DNA to the language he or she is condemned to by birth? Without translators — and bilingual writers (think about Kafka, Rilke, Nabokov, etc.) — , we are easy prey for line production and standardization.
2. Sudden Death roams across the geographic and temporal landscape of the Renaissance, and historical peculiarities are often a subject of your work. What draws you to a historical period or figure? How do you think about the relationship between history and the present?
I don’t work with the past, but with ways to re-imagine the past. I don’t write historical novels, but novels that wonder: and what if it happened in this way and not in this other one? History is like Santa Claus: a language construction. We have some registers about the existence of Santa and History — the presents under the tree, the archives — but none have really seen them. I read a lot of History — I mean, a lot, seriously — and get drawn in by many characters and circumstances, but there are a few that are complex, significant and fun enough to spend some years reading and thinking and writing with them.
3. Your work includes a number of fantastical or surreal elements — like the presence of Mary Magdalene at a 16th century tennis match. What is the importance of those elements for you?
It is not Mary Magdalene but Fillide Melandroni, the prostitute that Caravaggio used as a model for that beautiful painting in which she is wondering about things in front of the mirror of vanity. Or it could be Mary Magdalene. Writing is so fun precisely because if you take out the right adjective, the readers can decide what kind of book is in their hands. Suspension of disbelief should not be mandatory in contemporary writing.
4. Sudden Death begins with a tennis match between Italian painter Caravaggio and Spanish poet Quevedo. In this interview with the New York Times, you said you were “interested in [Caravaggio and Quevedo’s] kind of decadent masculinity, so different than, say, the hideous 19th-century concept of masculinity.”Can you expand a little on that? How do you define their masculinity, and what interests you about it?
There is this sonnet written by Francisco de Quevedo that would be named in English something like “I looked at my homeland’s walls”. While getting to the end of the poem he says: “I saw my sword, defeated by age”. Quevedo was the master of a rhetorical tool named “calambur”, in which a sentence or a poem can mean one thing when read in a certain key and a very different one in another. If you read “I look at my homeland’s wall” as a philosophical piece, you see the poet staring at his stuff and meditating on the finitude of life. But if you make a political reading of it, you get to the sword stanza and discover that what you are reading is the most hilarious and brutal meditation ever done about Imperial Erectile Dysfunction. At the very end, Quevedo lived most of his adult life thanks to the money of Hernán Cortés’ granddaughter: he is the patron saint of all of us who belong to the pink collar economy. But you can say the same thing about Cortés himself: the only brilliant moment of his life — and it was so brilliant that it changed the world’s economy forever — happened while he was the lover of Malinche. Once he dismissed her, thinking that he had learned enough of her political ability — an ability that had earned him the Aztec empire! — all went to hell. He died alone, forgotten, living a sadly Spartan old life. Or Caravaggio himself: he played proudly the role of handsome bisexual young artist at the service of an openly gay cardinal, and his early work was driven by the dramatic genius of Fillide Melandroni. Gender roles were not that strict in the past. All of the information I use in the novel was always there, it’s just that none had wanted to have fun acknowledging it.
5. Reviewers often compare your writing with that of Roberto Bolaño. What do you make of that comparison?
I’m not responsible for other people’s comparisons. I don’t know what to make of them. I guess it doesn’t hurt — at a personal level, I mean. I don’t belong — because of my age — to the cult of Bolañolatry but I think that The Savage Detectives is a tremendously important novel. And I love that little, poetic gesture of resistance: if you belong to the dominant language — English, of course — you have to find the damned ñ on your keyboard to write his name.
BONUS: We always like to know what authors are reading. What books have caught your attention recently?
I’m researching a novel, so I have been reading a lot of very weird historical stuff the last two years. Anyway, from time to time I stop for the so pleasant relief of a good novel, or I find a wonderful piece of writing between the always arid research materials. That’s how I found the very beautifully written and quite disturbing An Apache Campaign in the Sierra Madre, by Capt. John G. Bourke — an ethnology aficionado and compassionate racist who wrote this memoir of a brutal genocide thinking that he was doing a good Christian’s work (very instructive about contemporary conservative politics in America). During the Winter Break I read The Lost Time Accidents, by John Wray, with the pleasure of a teenager discovering literature –“so that’s why we write novels in the first place”, I kept thinking — . I’m reading the English translation of Fernando del Paso’s Palinuro of Mexico — edited by Dalkey — to write an article, which means that I am not writing the article at all but tremendously happy re-reading that mad man’s massive masterpiece of a novel. This is the moment for Latin American New Writing proselytism, right? Deep Vellum is about to publish Seeing Red by Lina Meruane (Chilean) — translated by the excellent Megan McDowell — a very original and powerful novel.
