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.
