Short Review: You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue

Sculpture, Templo Mayor, Mexico City. Pat Sullivan, 2025

Enrigue vividly describes the 1519 encounter between Moctezuma, the emperor of Tenochtitlán (now Mexico City), and the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés. His use of words from Nahuatl, the language of the Mexica, threw me into the tension created by the meeting of two cultures. I can only imagine the patience demanded of Moctezuma and Cortés as they waited for their two translators (one working from Nahuatl to Maya, the other from Maya to Spanish) to relay the conversation. Although this is a short novel, I made frequent use of the helpful list of characters, until I became more familiar with the names.

He does not use quotation marks to delineate conversation, and sometimes characters’ points of view change within a chapter, but Enrigue’s colloquial and humorous style makes it easy to surrender to the tone of the novel. It's a very earthy book: one of the conquistadors tries to trim his toenails with a sword after the long march from the coast to the city. Whoever thought of the challenges of grooming before nail clippers? The imaginative use of such mundane facts is what I admire about good historical fiction.

Towards the end, the real world gives way to hallucinations and dreams. Cortés takes peyote with Moctezuma. They each dream of conquering the other. We know who won.

I visited Mexico City for the first time last March. I saw the ruins of the pre-conquest main temple and the powerful sculpture of the Aztecs and other Indigenous peoples in the stunning National Museum of Anthropology. I stayed in the same hotel where the dictator Porfirio Díaz ate in 1910 just before he learned of the revolution’s start. I saw Trotsky’s grave and Frida Kahlo’s painting studio. The dynamism of Mexico’s history impressed me, but you don’t have to go there to be drawn into You Dreamed of Empires. Enrigue’s lively prose, translated by Natasha Wimmer, will transport you.