You Dreamed of Empires

Enrigue stages the fateful 1519 meeting between Moctezuma and Cortés as something closer to a chamber drama than a conquest epic, compressing the encounter into a single hallucinatory day inside Tenochtitlan's palace. The novel's boldest choice is tonal: court intrigue, drug-addled visions, and bureaucratic maneuvering sit alongside deliberate anachronisms that puncture any sense of historical piety. Enrigue is less interested in refighting the conquest than in imagining the empire's collapse as contingent, almost avoidable, right up until it isn't. The prose shifts registers constantly, from comic to violent to dreamlike, mirroring the disorientation of a civilization encountering something it has no framework to understand. It's a revisionist history that refuses the solemnity usually attached to this material.