“In Mexico I think I’m considered conservative,” the writer Álvaro Enrigue, 46, muses. “Not politically—in terms of form and experimentation.”

“You’re definitely not one of the most radical, experimental writers,” agrees his wife, the writer Valeria Luiselli, 32. She’s seated beside him on a low-slung sofa in their cozy shared New York writing studio on a recent cold, gray afternoon.

To the American reader, Enrigue’s new novel, Sudden Death, out last month from Riverhead in an edition translated by Natasha Wimmer (of Roberto Bolaño–translating fame), will seem the opposite of conservative. But that’s perhaps because most of us haven’t read much contemporary Mexican fiction, though more and more crosses over each year. “I think maybe because there are still such heavy, traditional structures, escaping them is something you celebrate,” explains Enrigue. “In Mexico City, you just feel the art boiling.” Another way to put it: “Great rock ’n’ roll comes from suburbia,” he says. “It always comes from—”

“Shitty situations!” Luiselli chimes in.

book

The central concern of Sudden Death is a fictional 16th-century tennis match played between the Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo and the Italian painter Caravaggio. The ball is made from the hair of King Henry VIII’s beheaded wife, Anne Boleyn. Radiating out from that nucleus are other stories about culture clashes between worlds old and new. One bit imagines Caravaggio’s steamy gay sex life. Another tells the story of Hernán Cortés’s bloody conquest of Mexico from the point of view of his local translator and mistress, La Malinche. There’s a chapter written in screenplay form, featuring Pope Pius IV. There are others that imagine email exchanges between Enrigue and his editor. Some chapters comprise all of two sentences.

It’s a bawdy, often profane, sprawling, ambitious book that is as engaging as it is challenging. Enrigue earned a rave from The New York Times, which dubbed Sudden Death “a splendid introduction” that “also raises a question related to the themes of the novel: Why are English-language readers only now getting a glimpse of what this gifted writer has produced in a career that is already two decades old?” Others have also registered Enrigue as the latest in a series of fresh new Latin American voices to arrive on a U.S. literary scene suddenly hungry for talent drifting up from the south.