Sudden Death
by Álvaro Enrigue
Caravaggio vs. Hernán Cortés. Tennis. 1599.
For you if
you want history to be as strange and funny as it actually was
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A tennis match between the painter Caravaggio and the conquistador Hernán Cortés, played with a ball made from the hair of Anne Boleyn. Completely insane. Also a serious meditation on the conquest of Mexico, the nature of violence, and what European civilization actually was when it arrived in the Americas. Enrigue makes you laugh and then makes you think and the two things happen simultaneously. History as it should always be told.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- Mexico • Latin America
- Voice
- Written by a Mexican author
- Themes
- nature of violence
Related Viewing
Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.
Like Water for Chocolate(1992)
dir. Alfonso Arau
Forbidden love, served through food.
In early-1900s Mexico, Tita is forbidden by family tradition from marrying the man she loves, so she pours her longing into the food she cooks — food that carries her emotions, sometimes literally, into everyone who eats it. Adapted from Laura Esquivel's novel.
Why it’s here: Punk in making a kitchen the site of rebellion — Tita's cooking becomes the one language her mother can't control or silence. Pedagogical in showing how inherited "duty" polices women's desire generation after generation, and what it costs to break that chain.
Pedro Páramo(2024)
dir. Rodrigo Prieto
A ghost town where the dead won't stop talking.
A man travels to his late mother's hometown to find the father he never knew, only to discover Comala is a ghost town in the most literal sense — populated by the dead, still narrating the tyranny of the cacique who once ruled it. Adapted from Juan Rulfo's novel.
Why it’s here: Punk in blurring the line between the living and the dead until power and guilt outlast the man who held them — Pedro Páramo's tyranny haunts Comala long after his death. Pedagogical in showing how one man's greed can hollow out an entire town's future.
Same event, different angle
The same history — told by someone who saw it differently.
Flip the lens
Same country. Now hear it from the other side.
El Narco
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The drug war by someone who stayed long enough.
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Fifty years of Mexican kitchens before they're gone.
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Prayers for the Stolen
Jennifer Clement
Girls raised to disappear before the cartel finds them.
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The Daughters of Juárez
Teresa Rodríguez
Mothers refusing to let their daughters be statistics.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST