You Dreamed of Empires
Álvaro Enrigue, trans. by Natasha Wimmer
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
You Dreamed of Empires
Álvaro Enrigue, trans. by Natasha Wimmer
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Not wet but dry. It is also 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.
In Enrigue's skillful hands, the culmination of political maneuvering almost too intricate to follow.
Sublime absurdities that abound in this delirious historical fantasia, which can be said to be many things: funny, ghastly, eye-opening, marvelous and frequently confounding. Mr. Enrigue’s novel—steeped in research but wildly fictionalized—encompasses roughly a single day in this clash of civilizations, beginning after Cortés and his men have been installed in the royal palace and, oddly, left alone to explore the premises.
Enrigue presents us with two societies that feel far removed from our modern sensibilities, one of which — the Aztec empire — has often been shoddily reproduced, its complexity buffed away.
Deliciously gonzo.
The ending of You Dreamed of Empires, the aftermath of that fateful meeting, is both expected and surprising, the author having a bit of cake and eating it too. It has been pitched as a colonial revenge story, restitutive, and revolutionary. But these descriptors shift focus toward what happens and away from what I believe is the novel’s greatest strength: its comfort in the murky could-have-been..
At times, the novel’s self-conscious narrative voice pokes through the seams of its own reporting.
This is a flighty, eccentric, fable-like account, bursting with character and with storytelling electricity, where the author’s ironic eye always has the last glance.
Essentially a comedy for most of the way.
Enrigue’s novel shows how alien both cultures appear to the other.
Imaginative.
Passages of dense historical detail may be tough going for some readers, but the frisson of intrigue Enrigue effortlessly builds through multilayered narratives and ingenious plotting never flags in this riveting, daring work..
Agile.
As an author, Enrigue revels in physical action—scatological transgressions, sexual encounters, thwacking a tennis ball made from the hairs of a beheaded English queen head—but his focus in You Dreamed of Empires often makes uncomfortable bedfellows of the somatic with the psychological. But there’s a ruse: 'Before the Nap,' the section where Enrigue spends a third of the book, uses grotesque visuals and hair-brained antics of Moctezuma and Cortés to distract from a broader tale of political intrigue.
Although slow to reach any substantial action, You Dreamed of Empires has many of the elements of a good political thriller: twists, turns, hidden motivations and a lot of tension. Not that this makes it an easy book to classify – despite the abundance of tropes, chaos is the moving force in the Mexican author’s psychedelic novel, resulting in an eclectic work of exceptional originality, narrowly rescued from becoming overwhelmingly absurd by an open awareness of its fictionality..
Dynamic and stimulating.
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..