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:

More absurdity this week:  FIFA, the international governing body of football, banned the Iranian women’s soccer team from an Olympic qualifying event because the players wear hijab — Islamic headscarves.  The official reason:  safety.  Wearing a hijab while playing “could cause choking injuries.”

Yeah, sure.  As one commenter noted, Google “hijab soccer choking deaths” and the search engine doesn’t exactly hum.

These aren’t just any hijabs, mind you.  They have to be the coolest  ones ever.  They’re like speed-skaters’ hoods, and the players look like white-clad ninjas.   I’ll bet they can move like ninjas too.   Clearly FIFA has no sense of style.

Correction:  FIFA has no sense, period.

The decision to ban the Iranian team was made by FIFA head Sepp Blatter, who’s apparently one of those Berlusconi-type men who’ll tell you how much he loves women, by which he means how much he loves looking at female flesh.  No, I’m not making assumptions.  The arrant hypocrisy of this ban is clear when you consider the fact that Blatter proposed in 2004 that women players wear plunging neckines and hot pants on the pitch to boost soccer’s popularity.  Tighter shorts, he said, would create “a more female esthetic.”

I guess it was kind of amazing he didn’t propose wet tee-shirts.

And if you believe that Blatter is for a moment concerned about women being injured, his response to requests by human rights organizations to take a stand against the sex trafficking that accompanies the arrival of the World Cup was this:  “Prostitution and trafficking of women does not fall within the sphere of responsibility of an international sports federation but in that of the authorities and the lawmakers of any given country.”

No, Blatter’s all about the sport.  He’s presumably salivating for more on-field celebrations like Brandi Chastain‘s famous shirtless moment when the U.S. won the 1999 Women’s World Cup.  And drooling over women’s sportswear catalogs instead of Victoria’s Secret ones.  In which case he’s pathetically misreading that Chastain photo.  This was the victory of hard work and muscle over frills and pretty posturing.  Serena Williams revolutionized women’s tennis in much the same way, making it a power game (in dress as well as style of play — the black catsuit she wore a couple of years back was dynamite).

What Blatter’s really doing is trying to piggyback on the burqa ban in France and the minaret ban in his native Switzerland.  But the good news is that it’s backfiring on him.  Badly.  Already the focus of multiple accusations of corruption in his 12-year tenure as FIFA president, he probably saw this as an easy way to try to redeem himself by jumping on the anti-Muslim bandwagon.  Instead, the storm of criticism might be an indication that Europeans are beginning to realize just how badly they’ve been manipulated by misogynistic xenophobes on such issues as burqa bans.

One further note on that shirtless photo:  Chastain herself was amazed when it ran worldwide .  “I wasn’t trying to make a statement;  I was just carried away, and doing what male players do in the same situation,” she told me when I met her not long after.  “I was really surprised there was so much fuss about it.  I mean, there’s a much better photo of the victory moment, but nobody ran that one.”  Here it is, on the right — the photo they didn’t run, baggy shirt, baggy pants, and all.  Which I guess just means the world is full of Blatters.

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(Thank to Sarah Hashim for alerting me to this story.  I know I was born in England, but soccer’s not my thing.  Tennis, though…)

All the cool people are into World Cup soccer right now.   But then I’ve never been very good at being cool.   Right now I’m skipping work to watch Wimbledon, entranced all over again by the total heat of Rafael Nadal.

I admire the coolness of Roger Federer and the nonchalant mastery of his play, but it’s Rafa I feel passionate about, and have done ever since I first saw him on court.  Passion inspires passion.

Watch his eyes — not just focused, but fiercely focused, a look I see sometimes in Federer’s face, but all the time in Rafa’s.  It’s that intensity that gets me.  That and the sheer physicality:   the sweat flying off his hair as he swings, or the boxer’s trot to the baseline, or the huge leaps of celebration when he breaks a tough opponent’s serve — leaps too balletic, almost, for such a heavily muscled body.

I once saw Rudolf Nureyev dance in London, shortly after he defected to the West.  The curtain rose on three men standing still with their backs to the audience.  Yet even in absolute stillness, you had no doubt which was Nureyev.   His body seemed to vibrate with energy, ready to explode at a split second’s notice.

That’s Rafa.  What seems wild energy is bent to his intent.  What seems all muscle is in fact all will.  Or rather, muscle and will — brawn and brain — are fused.   The hard work’s been done so thoroughly — the tens of thousands of hours of daily practice and exercises, training and reviews — that now he can let trained instinct take over.  There is no hesitation as he spins, dives, races, returns unreturnable shots, finds impossible angles.   It’s as though the moment he walks on court — or perhaps the moment he puts on the headband he always wears to play — he is transformed into pure vitality.

That headband is like his version of a Samurai sword.  When he puts it on, he’s girding himself to enter another realm of existence.  Each point is played like it’s the only point in the world, each moment taken as though it’s the only moment that ever has existed or will exist.   Then, as soon as he’s hit the match-winning shot, he snatches off the headband, shakes the sweat out of his hair, and is transformed back into the sweet, somewhat shy 24-year-old I’m assured he is off court.

So he’s not suave and sophisticated and sexy like Federer.  I don’t care.  When I watch him, every nerve and muscle firing, I’m watching the fullest expression of vitality.  I’m watching being at its most intense.

And then, okay, I confess — there was something very sexy about that nibble on the Wimbledon trophy…