Sudden Death, Álvaro Enrigue’s previous novel to appear in English, spun an audacious patchwork of historical reflection around the tale of a tennis match – really a barely disguised duel – between the painter Caravaggio and a Spanish noble in 16th-century Rome.
The US-based Mexican writer toys once more with the factual record in You Dreamed of Empires, an imaginative riff on the foundation of Mexico City by the conquistador Hernán Cortés after the sack of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlán in 1521, one of the threads of Sudden Death. This more streamlined retelling of the episode all but abandons digression to cleave to the perspective of a dozen-strong cast, playing colonial conquest as a kind of heist comedy, with the target nothing less than a city. The emphasis is on buffoonery as much as barbarity, with the unsteady dance of diplomacy between the incoming Spaniards and soon-to-be-deposed (or not) emperor Montezuma – here, Moctezuma – a greater focus than bloodshed, which nonetheless arrives in spades.
What most interests Enrigue, you feel, is the absurd chanciness of history, as he presents Cortés’s expedition as a slaver’s errand that got wildly out of hand. Gore and grime are mostly a matter of atmosphere rather than action, but there’s a low-level crackle from casually dropped detail of, say, someone using the spine of a hallucinogenic cactus to draw blood from their penis as an offering to the gods, or the mention of “buttocks… poorly wiped over months of campaigning”, to say nothing of meals of grasshopper tacos and “warrior arm”.
As historical personages mix with fictional, Enrigue pulls the rug from under unwary readers with a mid-book shift from the past tense into the subjunctive – a prelude to further counterfactual jiggery-pokery as the narrative finally forks into contradictory possibilities, fuelled by its characters’ habit of snacking on psychoactive flora. There’s a surprising role for Marc Bolan, and at one point Moctezuma has a vision of Enrigue himself writing the novel – a prospect already invoked grudgingly by a conquistador who can’t find his way out of the emperor’s palace: “When somebody puts what’s happening to us now in a book… they’ll think it’s more chivalric romance bullshit.”
Part of Enrigue’s project is to complicate textbook simplicities by means of his characters’ pointedly mixed lineage: “The English historians of the 19th century, who really had no clue, would call them Aztecs to solve the problem, and it stuck.” The novel’s setting is spelt Tenoxtitlan, pronounced Tenoshtítlan, the stress on the “i”, not the “a” stressed by the Spaniards, or Caxtilteca as the Aztecs called them. A prefatory note presented – with much charm – as an email from Enrigue to his translator, Natasha Wimmer, explains the choice isn’t guided by purity but a desire for the sonic “warmth of the language of the ancient Mexicans”. “Don’t worry too much about the Nahuatl words you come across. Mexican readers won’t know right away what a macehual or a pipil is either. Let the meanings reveal themselves: the brain likes to learn things and we’re wired to register new words.”
Still, much as he’s right to trust the reader, I can’t honestly say I never lost track of the action as it bubbles to the boil: partly just through my being a doofus, but partly too because of those deliberately defamiliarising spellings (which “look as strange to me as they do to you, though I was born and raised in Mexico City”), not to mention the sheer number of moving parts in the storyline. My proof fell apart because of how often I turned back to the dramatis personae, and it’s hard not to feel that the novel’s overarching sensibility – a dry humour winningly attuned to farce – emerges more sharply than any individual character.
In the end, it’s an enigma: engaging in tone, design and intent, always ticking along on trippy earthiness, yet somehow never quite catching light. Enrigue’s acknowledgments make clear the novel was written through lockdown and ultimately it has the air of a diversion from the present – even more pleasurable to write, you suspect, than to read.
You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue, translated by Natasha Wimmer, is published by Harvill Secker (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
