In Álvaro Enrigue’s latest novel, “You Dreamed of Empires,” originally published in Spanish as “Tus Sueños Imperios Han Sido,” readers travel back in time to 1519 and into the bustling city of Tenochtítlan, the capital of the Mexica empire and the city that lies below modern-day Mexico City. There, Tlatoani (Emperor) Moctezuma is dealing with the aftermath of the arrival of Conquistador Hernán Cortés, who has allied himself with the Tlaxcalteca and presents a threat to the empire that sends his entire court into chaos. This political thriller imagines the inner workings of the lives of the young decision-makers in the Mexica empire and how the city prepared itself for the meeting that would change the course of world history.
However, Enrigue’s vision is far from a historical novel. While strongly rooted in historical evidence in its depiction of the life of the Mexica, “You Dreamed of Empires” is full of humor, references to Mexican literature and history, as well as 70s rock, and it opens the doors for new readers to understand the complexity and beauty of Mesoamerican history. We sat down with Álvaro Enrique for an interview about the novel and talked about the influence of Jorge Luis Borges, 16th and 17th-century literature, the origin of some of the aesthetic choices behind the novel as well as some of the challenges it hopes to create. Here’s the conversation.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity
Hello Álvaro, how are you?
All good, but quite hectic. The semester is winding down. I’ve had a lot of promotional trips, and it all coincided with promotions in the United States and Italy, along with managing a one-and-a-half-year-old baby during the semester…
The perfect combination.
But at the same time, the book has received a lot of kindness.
That leads me to the first question I had because the book came out at the end of 2022 in Spanish and just came out in English about three months ago. So, how has the reception of the book been, at least the English version, in the last three months?
Well, for me, it’s surprising because I’ve been a writer with few but great readers. And in the United States, this book has gone beyond my usual readership. It has reached a type of reader that my books didn’t usually reach. So, that brings me immense joy because a book is a conversation, right?
For me, writing a book is like having a conversation about a topic that interests, and suddenly in the United States and in England, this book had a huge impact. It had happened to me before with “Sudden Death” in Spanish, with the previous novel that will be released in the United States not too far in the future, it had happened in Germany. But, I had never lived where a book was exploding, so it has been very nice, of course, within my editorial experience, and also a bit strange to find interlocutors in the United States, I think it’s great.
It’s been great to see such an intensely Mexican book so well received. However, that leads me to this question. You’ve been based in New York for about 10 years. How has your time abroad affected your identity, your Mexican identity, and the way you identify with your country?
Well, I’ve been in New York for 13 or 14 years, and I arrived here very young, in ’98. I don’t think you were even born yet. I’ve been coming and going for many years. The stability of Mexico in recent years allows it, also, the geographical proximity. So, I maintain a very intense relationship with Mexico. I continue to read new Mexican literature despite having been here for years and years, and I’ve spent my adult life in the United States more than in Mexico. Although, I insist, there have been periods when I have returned to live in Mexico for several years. I have developed major projects there.
It’s also what I can write about. It’s what interests me. I have an alternative job as a critic; I write reviews. I still write at least two or three major reviews a year, and I do all of that in English. Most of the journalism I do is in English, but to write fiction, I feel that my English is not enough, and above all, a novel is many things, but it is above all, for me, a fierce duel with language. It’s making the words come close to what one wants to say, although the dream of a novel is always better than the novel itself.
Also, being Mexican in the United States is a particular condition, and it seems to me that I interact better with the intellectual life of the city where I live by writing about a country I know well, which is Mexico, and a history I know well, which is Mexico’s, than by writing about the United States, which is a country that has always been generous to me, but in which I still feel like a guest despite the fact that my adult life is mostly American.
It’s like a comparative advantage thing. You have the knowledge and understanding of Mexican references, which is where you can explore more.
Power, but also will, also desire. Literature has to do, above all, with desire. It’s, above all, a game, and in that sense, the game that interests me and the desire that encourages me has to do with my childhood in Mexico. It has to do with the motherhood of the Spanish language. For me, it has to do with the fact that my children, although they are all American, are intensely Mexican, etc. I live in a kind of bubble in New York, I suppose, but I’m not sure. I find it difficult to make general theories about literature because I’m a teacher, but yes, about my life, like everyone else, it seems to me that literature is what I have
I feel that “You Dreamed of Empires” is a playful and conversational novel. In the acknowledgments, you mentioned that it has a Borgesian style and that it is in response to “The Secret Miracle,” the story of the author condemned to death who stops time and manages to finish his masterpiece. I wanted to see if this is in the novel then like a speculation of how Mexico would have been without colonization. What is the nature of that conversation with Jorge Luís Borges?
The theme of Borges is a formal thing. A novel represents a problem, and that problem has to be solved when you are writing it. The light came, for me in this story, preparing a class on Borges. We read “The Secret Miracle” for many months. For maybe a year, I had the novel on hold. The novel was almost complete, but I didn’t quite understand how it should end. Borges appears as a literary reference on many occasions. Partly because he is a very important writer for me, but also partly because I always had the awareness that I was writing a fantastic novel. It was natural that I would find the solution, which maybe is more obvious to me than to the readers, while reading a Borges story.
What is literature? Well, it’s this long conversation with readers and with tradition and Homer and Horace and all that, but it’s also a very mundane thing that happens in this writing desk where I’m talking to you, and whose rhythms have to do with walking the dog, going to daycare to pick up the baby, with lunch. It’s true that we stand on the shoulders of giants, but it’s our language. It’s always unique, like our fingerprints or our genetic code, each person has a literary language. Most of the formal solutions have already been found by someone in the tradition, and what we do is somehow use again what at some point seemed genius and well, “The Secret Miracle” was that.
It’s like adding your own twist and, something that catches my attention a lot about the book is the twist you give it. The aesthetic system it uses. There are influences from comics, The descriptions you use to portray Cuauhtémoc make him feel as if he was Thor. There are songs like Monolith by T-Rex, which is a great song. The book has a 70s aesthetic even though it’s set in the 1500s. Was this influence deliberate or was it by coincidence?
It’s deliberately, for me, it’s very important. Everyone reads books as they want, and books belong to the readers, not their authors. But, for me, it’s important to point out the difference between working with historical materials and writing historical novels. There is a great tradition of historical novels, but I don’t feel attached to it. I’m a reader of historical novels. It’s natural that as a reader and a teacher, I move in that field, but for me, it was very important not to respect the rules imposed by chronology throughout the novel. That doesn’t mean that when I started the novel, I knew that at some point Moctezuma was going to dance to a T-Rex song.
The relationship between Moctezuma and Marc Bolan came later, also in a very mundane way. One day, while I was resting, writing that scene, I played a T-Rex record and said, “Of course, there’s a connection there,” but at the beginning of the novel, someone says that they studied in a Jesuit school and in 1519, St. Ignatius of Loyola was 14 years old. The novel not only does not accept the rules of historical narrative but breaks them with a lot of cynicism. In some cases, in very obvious ways, such as when the poet López Velarde appears. Once something enters a novel, it becomes fiction.
You mentioned that you don’t work with historical novels but your work is definitely based on existing historical documents and archaeological work. So, how was that process? Because Tenochtítlan is a character within the novel. It’s the setting but also influences the actions of the characters.
I am excited, I celebrate, and I am very grateful that you say that Tenochtítlan is a character because it is the character of the novel. The fundamental aesthetic gesture of the novel is to bring the city into the world as we believe it was based on the testimonies we have. They are really very few and very limited. To the testimonies we add archaeology, which in the last 20 years in Mexico City has grown exponentially, as well as the work of historians. One very important thing for the novel, too, is the discovery of indigenous sources. For many years, it was thought that there were only two or three indigenous testimonies, and very remote ones. Turns out that there are many more and that they are closer to the moment of the fall of Tenochtítlan.
The idea was to work with that very large archive, which I have been accumulating over the years, to produce an image of the city that vibrates in the imagination of a reader. Moreover, I am a professor of 16th and 17th-century literature, which means that I work a lot with historical sources. As you know, in Latin America, there was no fiction until the 19th century. There were poets, but fiction was prohibited, and in a very strange way, the people of the Spanish empire obeyed that order, and there really are no novels or accounts, nothing. As far as we know, because things always end up appearing.
In the end, Latin America is also a place where sometimes reality beats fiction, so it’s not that they didn’t have material to make super interesting chronicles.
And not all chroniclers told the truth; Cortés’ letters, which are the basis of this story, are actually, as far as we know, a political argument related to trying forgiven for committing a crime for launching an attack towards Tenochtítlan. From the beginning, there is a content of imagination in that writing that clearly had no relation to reality, but there are many sources, and I use them constantly because I teach about them, and it’s a topic that interests me and I have worked a lot on. I would have liked the city to survive. I think if Moctezuma had taken down Cortés, the war would have been lost anyway, sooner or later. The American biome could not resist the European biome, and the invasion was not won by horses or cannons; it was won by bacteria.
Of course, the extractive system of the economy was unthinkable for the Americans, so they didn’t know how to deal with it. They had different military traditions, but all those things happened and were going to happen. I would have liked the floating city of the Mexicas to have survived, that we had the temples. It was a wonderful city, and the fragility of the ecosystem made it impossible for people who hadn’t lived there for 200 generations to manage it. The natural result was the destruction of the city, but that destruction was accelerated by the violence of the conflict, and it’s a shame. It would have been good if it had survived for 100 years so that we would have reliable descriptions, at least to know.
Something you mentioned in a talk a couple of years ago is that novels challenge the imagination of readers. I really liked this phrase. So, considering that the novel has reached a new audience, what do you think is the challenge that this novel is presenting to the audience?
Wow, what a good question. Your question shows that abstract thinking sometimes leads us into alleys where it’s hard to speak. When I’ve said that the novel is a challenge, it’s an experience for the reader. I like novels that teach their readers to read them. Novels are that hard work at the beginning, but once you get into them, you discover that they make a new proposal of language and a new formal proposal. I don’t know if my little books are in those categories. I learned from José Emilio Pacheco that humility is the greatest virtue of a writer and that one should never lose the ground.
So, it’s hard for me to connect the novels that have changed my life with the little novels I write. I can’t do it. Still, I suppose that in this novel, there are a series of challenges. The questions are very interesting for an American reader. They have to do with losing fear, of course, of indigenous names, of discovering that it’s not difficult to say words in Nahuatl, that only the spelling is weird because it was made in the 16th century, but they are easy words to say.
Millions of people use them every day, and no one has died from using them. There is the challenge, which was very important for me while writing the novel, of representing that world where the first Europeans arrived, which had a confrontation with the people of the continent. Not the islands, but the continent, as real humans and not as monsters, as they were presented, shortly after the occupation, or as esoteric creatures, which is how they are usually represented today in Moctezuma’s court. It was a court like all the courts in the world. In reading the novel, you learn to see these mythical characters, who are in murals, who are in songs, in anthems, as real people with motivations like ours and everyday actions like ours.
It was a challenge as a writer because it’s also a very eccentric world. Most of us have eaten the food that Moctezuma ate, given the prestige and internationalization of Mexican food, but there are many things in the pre-Hispanic diet that would make us nervous. The political problem of human sacrifice, how does that fit in with a Western view of the world? Normalizing all those procedures was really a challenge for me. Of course, there is the urban challenge, to imagine the city with its different neighborhoods. I think, as a specialized reader you are, you will have noticed the work I put into knowing how Mexico City smelled in the 16th century, which is not easy, imagining the flavors, imagining the clothes because we have loose pieces, we have some pictorial representations, but in general, it’s a puzzle that still lacks most of the pieces.
Álvaro, those are all the questions I have! Thank you very much for your very interesting answers.
No, Pedro, thank you for your interest.
”You Dreamed of Empires” is available now in English from Riverhead Books.
Based in Mexico, Pedro Graterol is the News editor for TV and Film of InBetweenDrafts. He is a Venezuelan political scientist, violist, and a nerd of all things pop culture. His legal signature includes Sonic The Hedgehog’s face.
