Umberto Eco’s fans can rest assured knowing that the void his death leaves will never be too large when there are writers mixing history and metafiction as wittily as Alvaro Enrigue does here, in his first novel in English translation. How to convey the wealth of pleasure, information, and frenzied speculation he tosses into a centuries-spanning survey of art, religion, and colonialism that links Hernan Cortes to Thomas More to Caravaggio and on and on and on, all filtered through the game of tennis? I’m not quite sure, but I do know that few books peel away the endless cultural layers built into any and every human encounter quite like this one.