‘You Dreamed of Empires’ by Alvaro Enrigue    (2022) – 219 pages          Translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer

‘Sudden Death’ was a highly successful tour de force of a novel by Alvaro Enrigue, and now Alvaro Enrigue returns once again to the 16^th century with ‘You Dreamed of Empires’.

This time we are in Tenoxtitlan which was the name for the Aztec ruling courts in what is now Mexico City. The year is 1519, and the Spaniard adventurer Cortés and his men have arrived in Tenoxtitlan. They are expecting to meet Moctezuma (often spelled Montezuma) and his court. Moctezuma is the “huey tlanoani”, the supreme leader, of the Aztec people.

Tlilpotonqui is the “cihuacoatl” (mayor) of the city of Tenoxtitlan and second in line for the imperial throne. Moctezuma’s son Cuitlahuac is next in line. The Spaniards are named Caxtilteca by the Aztecs. Hernán Cortés is called El Malinche.

The author Enrigue plays this early meeting of Moctezuma and Cortés for a wild black comedy farce. Of course no one knows what actually transpired between these two men in 1519, so Enrigue is free to imagine, and that he surely does. Moctezuma wanders his palace “cooked to the gills” on magic mushrooms and eating grasshopper tacos with avocado sauce. One room in the palace is dedicated solely to the 40,000 skulls of the human sacrifices which Moctezuma can order with just the nod of his head. The Aztec practice of sacrificing humans to their gods in particularly brutal ways often comes up for some dark broad humor in the novel.

“The festivals with their severed heads, dismembered bodies, and rivers of blood flowing down temple steps were disgusting, but they also brought feasting, music, dances, intoxication.”

Whereas ‘Sudden Death’ had only the two main characters playing a relatively simple tennis match, ‘You Dreamed of Empire’ has a larger set of characters and a much more convoluted situation. The story becomes even more complicated for the reader with the lengthy unfamiliar Aztec names and the untranslated Aztec words.

There is a guide to the characters at the beginning of the novel, and I would suggest that the reader refer to it as often as necessary. I also believe it would have been useful to have a short index of the several ancient Aztec words that are used and their meanings, although the author Alvaro Enrigue himself writes in a prefatory note “Let the meanings reveal themselves: the brain likes to learn things, and we’re wired to register new words.“ However, for myself, a short dictionary of the ancient Aztec terms used would have been very helpful.

Grade :    B-

‘Sudden Death’ by Alvaro Enrigue   (2013)     261 pages       Translated by Natasha Wimmer

‘Sudden Death’ is an incredibly rich entertaining whirlwind trip through the 16^th century presented within the framework of a tennis match in 1599 between Italian artist Caravaggio and Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo.  Along the way, we have stops for English Queen Anne Boleyn and Spanish explorer Cortés and the church officials during the Counter Reformation as well as other excursions.

“I don’t know what this book is about.  I know that as I wrote it I was angry because the bad guys always win.  Maybe all books are written because in every game the bad guys have the advantage, and that is too much to bear.”

Instead of the usual axe, a sword was used by the special executioner from France brought in by English King Henry VIII in 1536 to behead Anne Boleyn.  There is a rumor that this executioner kept some of her hair to make four tennis balls.  Yes, this is spurious history, and I would not vouch for the accuracy of much that is in this novel.  That does not make these apocryphal stories any less fascinating.    The author Enrigue has these four Boleyn tennis balls bounce through the 16^th century being passed from Pope to Cardinal to financier to favored artists.   Thus we get to the time of the Counter Reformation and its accompanying tortures.

“Never were the connections among politics, money, art, and semen so tight or so murky or so unashamedly happy, tolerant, and fluid.”   

There are also occasional side trips to Mexico where the Aztecs led by Montezuma make the fatal mistake of not executing Cortés and his men upon their arrival.  For Enrigue who is from Mexico, the history of Cortés and Montezuma has special significance.  “There are few better illustrations of how a whole host of people can manage to understand absolutely nothing, act in an impulsive and idiotic way, and still drastically change the course of history,” Enrigue says of Cortés and his men.

I did not even know that tennis went back that far, but apparently there was tennis already in the Middle Ages.  Later Caravaggio was known for his realistic paintings and also for using prostitutes as models for his religious figures including the Virgin Mary.   Caravaggio is considered the most important artist of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, yet he was jailed on several occasions and had a death sentence pronounced against him after he killed a young man in a brawl in 1604.

‘Sudden Death’ contains so much of history and of rumor that it can be quite an overwhelming experience to read this novel.  However Enrigue presents all of this material in such a methodical and intriguing fashion it is ultimately pleasurable.

Grade:    A