YOU DREAMED OF EMPIRES - ÁLVARO ENRIGUE (trans. NATASHA WIMMER)

This is the first super timely book I’ve read in a while. It just came out in English last year, translated by the god, Natash Wimmer. When I heard about it, I knew I had to check it out. The book is a fictional retelling of what I consider the most insane episode in human history, Cortés’ visit to pre-conquest Tenoxtitlan (Enrigue has a short little letter at the beginning of the book about his idiosyncratic spellings of some Nahuatl words, I found his explanation pretty convincing and will be spelling the ancient name for my beloved Mexico City like that, with the “x,” from now on) and his meeting with Moctezuma. Has there been a stranger meeting, across a deeper divide with larger implications than that one? Nothing is even that close. Anyway, the book follows the various characters involved in this meeting, it takes place only in the city, after the Spanish arrive and the Aztecs have to decided what to do with them. We get the perspective of Cortés, La Malinche, Gerónimo de Aguilar, Montezuma, and his wife. Any of these characters would be worth their own much longer books, they all lived insane lives, but Enrigue gives us a just a little bit of each of them. He really sticks to the few days they are in the capital. If the book is missing anything to me, it would be the perspective of the Tlaxacans or other indigenous group that joined up with the Spanish to defeat the Mexica, which of course leads to their enslavement and destruction as well. The rendering of Montezuma is perhaps the most interesting part. He’s seen as very devoted to the gods, cruel, strange, aloof and confusing. He’s very high off mushrooms for the whole book, despite the high stakes involved, which allows for a bit of hallucination play (Montezuma hears a T-Rex song that the author is playing at one point) that helps to underscore how surreal and bizarre this meeting is. I thought Enrigue did a good job depicting both Montezuma and Cortes as insane, blood-soaked maniacs, which is how they both deserve to be remembered, without sinking to old stereotypes or moralizing either way. These are two cruel, wicked men who’s meeting had more to do with the shape of the modern world, especially here in the Americas, than anything else that ever happened. There is a strange rewriting of history right at the end, spoiler alert: Cortés is killed by the Aztecs on a trip right at the very end, leaving us with that ultimate “what if.” I would recommend this book in conjunction with THE FIFTH SUN which is an English language straight forward telling of this same history that helps round this thing out. Either way, Enrigue is one to watch. Wimmer doesn’t miss.