Tennis

Tennis is the central recurring motif of the novel that unites all of the disparate threads of the narrative. The narrative is anchored to a fictional tennis match between the poet and the artist around which all of the other narrative threads revolve: a tennis ball made from the hair of a dead queen is passed across the various nations of Europe, and in Mexico Cortés attends a ball game with the man who would become the last emperor of the Aztecs.

As with all of the historical material in the novel there is an interweaving of the fictional and the factual in the author’s descriptions of tennis. The author includes lengthy quotations from historical sources about the history of tennis (“TENNIS. GAME OF a likeness to handball. One player defends and the other attacks, then vice versa.” [11]) and intersperses these with in-depth descriptions...