You Dreamed of Empires: A Novel

by Álvaro Enrigue, Natasha Wimmer (Translator)

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Like a fever dream brought to life, this is the epic story of an ancient empire, political intrigue and destiny. When Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés arrives in Tenochtitlan, the glory and grandeur that greet him make him suspect that all is not what it seems. This surreal novel is unlike any other.

A NEW YORK TIMES TOP TEN BOOK OF 2024

A NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY TOP TEN BOOK OF THE YEAR

"Short, strange, spiky and sublime.” —Dwight Garner, New York Times

“Funny, ghastly, eye-opening, marvelous.” —Wall Street Journal

From the visionary author of Sudden Death, a hallucinatory, revelatory colonial revenge story.

One morning in 1519, conquistador Hernán Cortés enters the city of Tenochtitlan – today's Mexico City. Later that day, he will meet the emperor Moctezuma in a collision of two worlds, two empires, two languages, two possible futures.

Cortés is accompanied by his captains, his troops, his prized horses, and his two translators: Friar Aguilar, a taciturn friar, and Malinalli, an enslaved, strategic Nahua princess. After nearly bungling their entrance to the city, the Spaniards are greeted at a ceremonial welcome meal by the steely Aztec princess Atotoxtli, sister and wife of Moctezuma. As they await their meeting with the emperor – who is at a political and spiritual crossroads, and relies on hallucinogens to get by – Cortés and his entourage are ensconced in the labyrinthine palace. Soon, one of Cortés’s captains, Jazm'n Caldera, overwhelmed by the grandeur of the place, begins to question the ease with which they were welcomed into the city, and wonders at the chances of getting out alive, much less conquering the empire. And what if... they don't?

You Dreamed of Empires brings Tenochtitlan to life at its height, and reimagines its destiny. The incomparably original Álvaro Enrigue sets afire the moment of conquest and turns it into a moment of revolution, a restitutive, fantastical counterattack, in a novel so electric and so unique that it feels like a dream.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593544792
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/09/2024
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 7.00(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Álvaro Enrigue is a Mexican writer whose most recent novel is Sudden Death. His work has appeared in The New York Times, the London Review of Books, El País, and n+1, among other publications. His books have been awarded the Herralde Prize, the Barcelona Prize, and the Poniatowska Prize. A former Fellow at the Cullman Center and at Princeton University, he teaches Latin American Literature at Hofstra University and lives with his family in New York City.


Natasha Wimmer’s translations include Álvaro Enrigue’s Sudden Death, Nona Fernández’s Space Invaders and The Twilight Zone, and Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives and 2666. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Editorial Reviews

09/04/2023

Enrigue (Sudden Death) once again reimagines history in this dynamic and stimulating chronicle of Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés’s expedition into the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan in 1519. Despite Cortés’s blunder of trying to hug Emperor Moctezuma upon their initial greeting, Moctezuma welcomes the Spanish expedition into his palace, where the party waits for their official meeting with him. The perspective jumps between a host of characters on both sides, including Moctezuma’s sister and wife, the princess Atotoxtli, who tries to counsel the emperor despite his melancholy and reliance on hallucinogenic drugs; and Jazmín Caldera, Cortés’s third in command who gets lost in the mazelike palace on a quest to find the expedition’s horses. As everyone waits for the fateful meeting, Cortés’s translator wonders whether the Spaniards are “visitors or prisoners.” Enrigue sustains a seductive yet ominous tone that evokes a persistent threat of violence, and he caps things off with a dizzying climactic scene that offers an alternative to the historical record and dovetails with the book’s heavy dose of hallucinogens. Flexing his narrative muscle, Enrigue brings the past to vivid, brain-melting life. Agent: Ria Julien, Frances Goldin Literary Agency. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 01/01/2024

Inspired by the work of Jorge Luis Borges, Mexican novelist Enrigue (Sudden Death) writes a fantastical spin on the history of the famous Aztec leader Moctezuma II and his fateful meeting with the Spaniard Hernán Cortés in 1519. Moctezuma is 55 years old and moody and does not like to be seen outside of the palace. He depends on the hallucinogenic properties of plants to get through the day. Once the fierce military leader who won his first war at the age of 14, Moctezuma now likens his leadership role to head priest of a cult. Cortés and his entourage are allowed into the city of Tenochtitlan and ushered past the gates into the labyrinth of the palace, where they wait—and wonder. Details of human sacrifice, the Aztec penchant for dismembering enemies, and making wind chimes of skulls and skeletal remains are well described in realistic terms. The human chimes were made to scare rivals and deter warring factions and were mostly successful, until the Aztecs encountered the invading Cortés. VERDICT In Enrigue's well-researched novel, a segment of Aztec history comes to life, with the author's own twist.—Lisa Rohrbaugh

Library Journal

2023-09-26
A vision of the Aztec empire on the verge of conquest.

In 1520, Spanish conquistadors led by Hernán Cortés began to wrest control of Tenochtitlan (in what is now Mexico City) from the Aztecs. But in November 1519, when Enrigue’s arch historical novel is set, the two cultures were play-acting at diplomacy. The Aztecs are baffled by the Spaniards’ horses, the proclamations of their King Charles I, and tales of Christianity. The conquistadores, meanwhile, find the food repulsive, the long waits frustrating, and are troubled by a citadel decorated with thousands of skulls. In the run-up to the inevitable horrors to come, Enrigue focuses on one junior representative from each side: Jazmín Caldera, an investor in Cortés’ expedition, and Atotoxtli, the sister and (figurehead) wife of Moctezuma, the Aztec emperor whose alliances are crumbling and who is prone to retreat into a druggy, sleepy haze. Moctezuma is mercurial, prone to calling for the execution of assistants at the smallest slights, but the Spaniards aren’t much better, slavers biding their time. Enrigue’s tone (nicely conveyed via Wimmer’s translation) is of ironic disbelief—the fate of two global cultures turns on the narcissistic preening of these two tribes? (“If there’s anything Spaniards and Mexicans have always agreed upon, it’s that nobody is less qualified to govern than the government itself,” Enrigue quips.) Little has changed, Enrigue means to say, at certain moments pushing the story out of strict historical fiction, at one point suggesting that a foreboding sound echoes a T. Rex song, or crafting an ahistorical dream sequence in which history turns the Aztecs’ way. In the acknowledgments, Enrigue cites Borges as a key inspiration, and the novel certainly shares an affinity for dark humor, metanarrative, and detail about history, real and imagined. But the irony and wit Enrigue brings to the story is entirely his own.

An offbeat, well-turned riff on anti-colonialist themes.

Kirkus Reviews

Praise for You Dreamed of Empires

"Short, strange, spiky and sublime. It’s a historical novel, a great speckled bird of a story, set in 1519 in what is now Mexico City. Empires are in collision and the vibe is hallucinatory.... Enrigue, who is clearly a major talent, has delivered a humane comedy of manners that is largely about paranoia (is today the day my head will be lopped off?) and the quotidian bummers of life, even if you are powerful beyond belief."
—Dwight Garner, New York Times

“Sublime absurdities... abound in this delirious historical fantasia, which can be said to be many things: funny, ghastly, eye-opening, marvelous and frequently confounding.”
—Wall Street Journal

"This salty and dark historical fantasia feistily explodes well-worn textbook narratives about the meeting of the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés and his captains with the Aztec emperor Moctezuma and his entourage in Tenoxtitlan . . . Enrigue’s depiction of the stressed-out, clumsy Cortés and the drugged-out, mercurial Moctezuma sets these near-mythical figures into earthy relief . . . Natasha Wimmer’s English translation sharply delivers the novel’s poetic and witty qualities, while at the same time reveling in its core theme: the fundamental untranslatability of human experience."
—NPR, 2024 "Books We Love"

"Enrigue’s genius lies in his ability to bring readers close to its tangled knot of priests, mercenaries, warriors and princesses while adding a pinch of biting humor."
—Los Angeles Times

“Incantatory... Enrigue conjures both court intrigue and city life with grace.”
—The New Yorker

“Riotously entertaining...Enrigue revels in the salacious and the scatological, serving up a sensory feast. All praise for the translator, who has so magnificently grappled with multiple layers of language. As in her rendition of Enrigue’s encyclopedic novel Sudden Death, Natasha Wimmer brilliantly brings the author’s playfulness and idiomatic humour to life for an English-language readership. The result is a triumph of solemnity-busting erudition and mischievous invention that will delight and titillate.”
—Financial Times

"An alternate history of Mexican conquest, with a Tarantino-ready twist.... Deliciously gonzo.... Rendered in earthy, demotic, wryly unhistorical English by translator Natasha Wimmer... Enrigue’s antic style is high-minded, richly detailed, vulgar and sophisticated all at once."
—Washington Post

“Throughout the book, Enrigue (and in English his excellent translator, Natasha Wimmer) boldly uses modern language to recreate the past.... Parts of the novel play like an Aztec West Wing, taking us deep into the political manoeuvrings of the royal court but blending its particularities with 21st-century psychology. It’s a rich approach that achieves a hallucinatory vividness.”
—The Guardian (UK)

“Enrigue sustains a seductive yet ominous tone that evokes a persistent threat of violence, and he caps things off with a dizzying climactic scene that offers an alternative to the historical record and dovetails with the book’s heavy dose of hallucinogens. Flexing his narrative muscle, Enrigue brings the past to vivid, brain-melting life.”
—Publishers Weekly

“The irony and wit Enrigue brings to the story is entirely his own. An offbeat, well-turned riff on anti-colonialist themes.”
—Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher