You Dreamed of Empires
A Novel
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You Dreamed of Empires
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Narrated by:
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Gabriel Porras
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Written by:
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Álvaro Enrigue
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Natasha Wimmer - translator
About this listen
A NEW YORK TIMES TOP TEN BOOK OF 2024
A NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY TOP TEN BOOK OF THE YEAR
"Short, strange, spiky and sublime.” —Dwight Garner, New York Times
“Funny, ghastly, eye-opening, marvelous.” —Wall Street Journal
From the visionary author of Sudden Death, a hallucinatory, revelatory colonial revenge story.
One morning in 1519, conquistador Hernán Cortés enters the city of Tenochtitlan – today's Mexico City. Later that day, he will meet the emperor Moctezuma in a collision of two worlds, two empires, two languages, two possible futures.
Cortés is accompanied by his captains, his troops, his prized horses, and his two translators: Friar Aguilar, a taciturn friar, and Malinalli, an enslaved, strategic Nahua princess. After nearly bungling their entrance to the city, the Spaniards are greeted at a ceremonial welcome meal by the steely Aztec princess Atotoxtli, sister and wife of Moctezuma. As they await their meeting with the emperor – who is at a political and spiritual crossroads, and relies on hallucinogens to get by – Cortés and his entourage are ensconced in the labyrinthine palace. Soon, one of Cortés’s captains, Jazmín Caldera, overwhelmed by the grandeur of the place, begins to question the ease with which they were welcomed into the city, and wonders at the chances of getting out alive, much less conquering the empire. And what if... they don't?
You Dreamed of Empires brings Tenochtitlan to life at its height, and reimagines its destiny. The incomparably original Álvaro Enrigue sets afire the moment of conquest and turns it into a moment of revolution, a restitutive, fantastical counterattack, in a novel so electric and so unique that it feels like a dream.
What the critics say
"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, who is clearly a major talent, has delivered a humane comedy of manners that is largely about paranoia (is today the day my head will be lopped off?) and the quotidian bummers of life, even if you are powerful beyond belief."
—Dwight Garner, New York Times
“Sublime absurdities... abound in this delirious historical fantasia, which can be said to be many things: funny, ghastly, eye-opening, marvelous and frequently confounding.” —Wall Street Journal
"This salty and dark historical fantasia feistily explodes well-worn textbook narratives about the meeting of the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés and his captains with the Aztec emperor Moctezuma and his entourage in Tenoxtitlan . . . Enrigue’s depiction of the stressed-out, clumsy Cortés and the drugged-out, mercurial Moctezuma sets these near-mythical figures into earthy relief . . . Natasha Wimmer’s English translation sharply delivers the novel’s poetic and witty qualities, while at the same time reveling in its core theme: the fundamental untranslatability of human experience." —NPR, 2024 "Books We Love"