Alvaro Enrigue’s Sudden Death
November 25th 2019
Audience
Totems and Lies
An early chapter “Beheading” recalls Anne Boleyn’s execution at the hands of Jean Rombaud. The names and the beheading are facts but little else in the text is. However it is true that until the 20th century tennis balls were made with hair. One possible project would be the construction of hair balls versus personally constructed balls with netting. One day students could pound them against one of these brick walls and whoevers balls are least ragged earn extra points.
Some characters
Another project.
A classic example in a book as dense as this would be to create a network of all the characters in the book. They could be marked as either historically real or fictions and their relationships could be marked as real, fiction, or simply unverifyable.
Assignment: research what is verifyable and unverifyable in the book. Write an essay on the precarity of our internet sources and the possibility of their loss.
Vasco de Quiroga
Vasco de Quiroga was a priest and bishop of Michoacan. He plays an important part in the final chapters of Sudden Death. He attempted to create a society under his bishopric that reflected the principles laid down in Thomas More’s Utopia, a satirical tract reacting to rule of Henry VIII. In the story Enrigue claims that “yesterday, at my corner deli in New York City, I bought a couple of perfect avocados grown in the orchards of Mecuacan by the descendants of Quiroga’s Indians.” I have no way to verify this truth although there are some encyclopedia entries that insist production in certain areas of the state have been constant since Quiroga’s time.
Assignment: Read Utopia by Thomas More. Write a tract as a reaction to what you see as gross misgovernance. Pay special attention to economic and ecological systems.
Tenochtitlan
The novels most major set-piece is the disaster that befalls the imperial seat of the Aztecs. Many Aztecs--like ancient Greeks and even more modern societies--thought of Tenochtitlan as a sort of naval in the world, from which the world gained sustenance.
Assignment: write a short story describing the ecological destruction of an imperial city (Washington D.C., Paris, Rome) or the possible climate catastrophe that could visit your hometown.
La Malinche & Cortez
La Malinche plays an important (perhaps outsized compared to raw history) role in the novel. Her ability to translate between various dialects of Nahuatl, Chontal and Spanish gives her the ability to manipulate the men around her. Assignment: essay. How does bilinguality affect your life or how might bilinguality, polyglotness or translinguality come in handy in modern America.
Ball games
Like David Foster Wallace and the Aztecs, Enrigue is obsessed with ball games, especially tennis. Throughout the text tennis, ball games and gambling play a central role in the text. Assignments (1): write about how sport may mediate politics in the present day, (2) read about renaissance era tennis and learn to play one of the speculatively developed formes, (3) research the ball games of mesoamerican peoples and give a presentation on the games.