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Dec. 1st, 2024 06:26 pmI'm pretty sure I picked up the recommendation for Álvaro Enrigue's You Dreamed of Empires somewhere around DW but I cannot for the life of me remember where, so if it was you please sing out so I can reread your post now that I've actually read the book! Anyway, I am very glad to have now read the book, which was deeply weird in a way that I think I liked but either way most definitely found compelling.
You Dreamed of Empires is a recounting of the day that Cortés and his men enter Tenochtitlan as invited guests-slash-prisoners of the Aztec Empire and have a series of formal meetings and meals with the emperor Moctezuma as well as his wife and several other politicians. At all times the book is straddling the lines between being deeply surrealist and incredibly mundane -- a lot of the reviews call it a 'humorous novel', which I do not think I would say, though I can see why you would say that because 'the encounter between two extremely bloody empires as a weird business meeting full of cultural miscommunication and messy office politics' sounds sort of like a bit from a comedy show. And the book is indeed often sharply funny, but it is just as often very matter-of-factly brutal. The fact that these are indeed two extremely bloody empires is foregrounded; indeed it is a large part of the point. The particular ways in which both these empires are bloody are very normal to the people involved and that is also part of the point. There is a rape on-page, which happens in three sentences that hit with a clang in the middle of other things, with an intentionally jarring lack of attention; for the victim and the perpetrator, this is an everyday event, although one that does have consequences. The whole book is permeated with the smell of blood. The Spanish visit a place of sacrifice and are mostly shocked, not by the wall of skulls, but by the fact that they're all so clean.
This is not a long book and the whole plot takes place in the span of a day, carefully choosing details to highlight. It's important when an extremely minor character makes a small misstep and is sentenced casually to death; it's important when a queer conquistador gets a transgressive high off experimenting with Aztec clothing; it's important when several stoned Aztecs see visions of a future man I absolutely could not identify wandering through their courtyard. Do I understand fully why all the things the book is showing me are important? Definitely not. Some of them I think are probably historical references that I am missing, and some of them I probably need a reread and a lit class to fully unpack, and some of them I think might just be funny. When Moctezuma, high on a trip, hears an entrancing new piece of music which turns out to be Monolith by T. Rex, is this important or just funny? Who could say, but it definitely is funny.
I also spent the entire book wondering if it was just a surreal historical novel playing in interstitial spaces or if it was going to end up going to end up counterfactual in some way. ( Description of the book's ending under the cut )
You Dreamed of Empires is a recounting of the day that Cortés and his men enter Tenochtitlan as invited guests-slash-prisoners of the Aztec Empire and have a series of formal meetings and meals with the emperor Moctezuma as well as his wife and several other politicians. At all times the book is straddling the lines between being deeply surrealist and incredibly mundane -- a lot of the reviews call it a 'humorous novel', which I do not think I would say, though I can see why you would say that because 'the encounter between two extremely bloody empires as a weird business meeting full of cultural miscommunication and messy office politics' sounds sort of like a bit from a comedy show. And the book is indeed often sharply funny, but it is just as often very matter-of-factly brutal. The fact that these are indeed two extremely bloody empires is foregrounded; indeed it is a large part of the point. The particular ways in which both these empires are bloody are very normal to the people involved and that is also part of the point. There is a rape on-page, which happens in three sentences that hit with a clang in the middle of other things, with an intentionally jarring lack of attention; for the victim and the perpetrator, this is an everyday event, although one that does have consequences. The whole book is permeated with the smell of blood. The Spanish visit a place of sacrifice and are mostly shocked, not by the wall of skulls, but by the fact that they're all so clean.
This is not a long book and the whole plot takes place in the span of a day, carefully choosing details to highlight. It's important when an extremely minor character makes a small misstep and is sentenced casually to death; it's important when a queer conquistador gets a transgressive high off experimenting with Aztec clothing; it's important when several stoned Aztecs see visions of a future man I absolutely could not identify wandering through their courtyard. Do I understand fully why all the things the book is showing me are important? Definitely not. Some of them I think are probably historical references that I am missing, and some of them I probably need a reread and a lit class to fully unpack, and some of them I think might just be funny. When Moctezuma, high on a trip, hears an entrancing new piece of music which turns out to be Monolith by T. Rex, is this important or just funny? Who could say, but it definitely is funny.
I also spent the entire book wondering if it was just a surreal historical novel playing in interstitial spaces or if it was going to end up going to end up counterfactual in some way. ( Description of the book's ending under the cut )
