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 ... Enrigue wears his influences on his sleeve.
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 ... The intricacy of this series of events might have daunted many writers; it’s difficult enough just to portray it accurately and make it comprehensible. Even when someone has done their research — and Enrigue has done it admirably well — the story could easily become ponderous and overblown, a mothballed costume drama. 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 ... At the same time, this comedy is a dark one ... I’m sure some people will complain of Enrigue’s fictional rendering. Yes, his knowledge of this era is meticulous.
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 ... Hallucinatory.
Deliciously gonzo ... Rendered in earthy, demotic, wryly unhistorical English ... Enrigue’s antic style is high-minded, richly detailed, vulgar and sophisticated all at once ... Delirious.
Imaginative ... 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 ... 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 ... 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.
Enrigue’s novel shows how alien both cultures appear to the other ... The novel is mestizo by construction, shifting between characters ... A brilliant twist.
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.
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 ... A lively tale ... Even at the end, Enrigue is playing with what we expect to happen — what we know did happen in reality — but that’s all part of his plan.
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.
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 ... So it’s satisfying when Enrigue delivers a blow. You Dreamed of Empires is, after all, a colonizer tale turned on its head, and in moments where Enrigue’s wit cuts with laughter, you can excuse him for wanting to land a few more punches on Cortéz’s legacy ... It is in their form—ravaging, dumb, dreamlike, free—that we can glean momentary order from Enrigue’s comic humor. It’s in navigating this esotery and symbolism that Enrigue is at his most expansive and striking ... In a letter to his translator for English-language readers, which provides a sort of foreword to the novel, Enrigue notes 'With age comes insecurity, and I spend more time revising then writing.' You Dreamed of Empires comes across as a perfect manifestation of these anxieties, at first a slumberous text that, we find, can also dream.
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.
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.
