Allow me to rave. I’ve read several good novels over the past few months, but none has bowled me over like this one.

Sudden Death is bawdy and metaphysical, cheeky and deadly serious, vividly funny and yet written from a place of very deep pain. In other words, it’s totally uncategorizable. And if I try to describe it, I know I’ll only turn most readers off.

It’s set in the sixteenth century, for a start. It revolves around a tennis match. It takes place in Mexico and Italy and Spain. The dialogue is without quotation marks, so you need to hear the speakers rather than read them. And on the very first page, there’s a sentence in Latin, untranslated.

Are you sufficiently turned off?

So let me tell you that the tennis ball in play is made of Ann Boleyn’s red hair, cut off her head just before her head was cut off from her body. And that there was nothing Wimbledon-like about tennis in the Renaissance, when it was a vicious game beloved by gamblers and low-lifes.

Then let me tell you that one of the players is a certain artist by the name of Caravaggio. And that one of the judges is a mathematician who turns out to be, on nearly the very last page… (but no, that would be a spoiler). And that major appearances are made by the conquistador Hernán Cortés, by Aztec emperors, by a Mayan princess, and by an assortment of venal popes. And – the clincher for me – grappa is downed by the jugful.

Or perhaps you’ll be as entranced as I am by tapestries woven entirely of feathers (scroll to the end for a piece made of hummingbird and parrot feathers). Or by the extraordinary mastery of the way Enrigue spans time and distance, finally setting my head spinning as though I was on mushrooms.

This Spanish and Mexican award-winner is the first of Enrigue’s novels to be translated into English, and I want to read all of them, right now. In the meantime, after marveling for a day once I’d finished this one, I began reading it again – and realized that of all the blurbs on the back cover, only the late lamented Carlos Fuentes manages to describe Sudden Death the way I would if I could.

This is a novel, he wrote, that “belongs to Max Planck’s quantum universe rather than the relativistic universe of Albert Einstein: a world of coexisting fields in constant interaction and whose particles are created or destroyed in the same act.”

Precisely (as it were): a quantum novel. No wonder I can’t describe it. No wonder many people will be frustrated by it. No wonder I love it.

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In case you take the leap, here’s a rough version of the Latin on the first page (with a bit of help from Google Translate). It’s a quote from the fifteenth-century Bishop of Exeter describing tennis as “profane oaths and gatherings, illicit and full of perjuries, often with fighting.”

And here — miserably flat and two-dimensional — is a Mexican Indian feather-art portrait of Jesus, made with hummingbird and parrot feathers:

I call them my niños, though of course they’re not  mine.  In fact I’ve never met them.  But their photo sits by my desk, a reminder of everything we don’t see when we indulge in the luxury of being tourists.

Writers are lousy at taking vacations.  The eye never stops seeing, the mind absorbing, the words forming.   So when a friend all but dragged me to Rio Caliente two years ago, I was amazed at how easily I adapted.  A spa so low-key that the word hardly applies, it’s an hour northwest of Guadalajara, 5000 feet up in the hills where water comes boiling out of the volcanic rock, the ground is strewn with chunks of onyx, and the Mexican sunlight is Middle Easternly pure and clear.  So I went back last year as a guest speaker, leading a small writing workshop.  And that’s when I found the niños.

Two of us had taken off to explore down the river gorge.  We’d frolicked in the falls (the only word for it, ‘frolicking’ – laughter bubbling up from deep inside as the water tossed us this way and that), dried off on the rocks, re-booted (as in the pre-computer sense of putting boots back on), and begun following an animal track through the scrub up against the steep hillside.   Since we weren’t as lithe as whatever animals had made this track, we found ourselves at a dead end – a small semi-spherical cave scooped out by a winter waterfall.   On the floor of the cave were the remains of a fire.  And in the ashes, a charred make-up compact, and a lipstick.

Suddenly, I felt cold.

I bent down, sifted through the ashes, and came up with a half-burned clump from someone’s wallet.  I could make out a credit card and a woman’s driver’s license almost fused together, sandwiching a brightly colored Virgin of Guadalupe holy card.  And then I saw the photo, set with clear deliberateness off to the side, away from the fire.

We looked, but found nothing else – no clothing, no signs of  a struggle.  Just the photo and the charred remains.  And a strong feeling that we needed to get out of there, back into the sunshine.

I scooped what I could into my daypack.  Back at Rio, Igor – yes, he’s Mexican – took his time when I laid it all out on the old wooden counter that serves as the ‘front desk,’ and merely raised his eyebrows when I suggested maybe calling the police.  Finally, he shook his head.  “Looks like a robbery,” he said.  “No point in reporting it.”  And he made as though to sweep everything into a waste basket.

I didn’t argue, though I couldn’t see why a thief would bother to make a fire.  Easier to just toss everything into the undergrowth, where it would never have seen the light of day.   But I couldn’t let the niños be thrown into the trash.  Someone had lovingly cut out that photo.  Someone else had carefully set it apart from the fire – someone with no qualms about burning a holy card but clear qualms about burning the photo, as though by doing so, he or she would harm the two boys.

So the niños came home with me.  Over the next few months, friends examined both sides of the photo — to the right is what’s written on the back — and were divided on whether it was a plain robbery or something more sinister.   It was only when a Mexican friend came round and heard the story that I finally found the word that made sense of it all.   “You know,” he said gently, “Santeria is quite strong in that part of Mexico.”

I write about the niños now because I’ll be back at Rio Caliente for the last two weeks of November.  Sans phone, sans computer, sans anything electronic.  Just books, a spiral notepad, hiking boots, and a swimsuit.  And the sharpened awareness that I’m just another gringo tourist, frolicking in the deep waters of other people’s lives.

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A couple of days after I posted this, a friend who was there wrote the following in an email:

“A beautiful and haunting post.  Reading it, I thought of yet another, alternate narrative:  Perhaps one of the niños (the older, protective one, perhaps?) was also the arsonist, who, in hoping to singe the remnants of his past, found that as much as he wanted to forget the woman, his life with her, her departure (possibly with, shall we say, the younger, wide-eyed niño, who may have also mysteriously gone missing), could not smolder his love for his brother, what they shared, all that made him who he is.  As if he feared, by setting fire to that picture, he, too, may have gone up in flames.  Instead, the niños, glossy-coated, resilient brothers they are, could remain, like Benjamin’s angel of history, forever looking into the ashes of the past, piling up, the winds of the fire blowing them unchanged into a floating, uncertain future.

“Ah, los niños, nunca los conocía y nunca los conoceré.  [tr:  I never knew them, and never will — LH]