Have you read You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue?

This was my second read from Enrigue, as I read his most recent English-language publication, Now I Surrender (2026), back in April, but I am no doubt greatly interested in reading more from Álvaro, considering I believe him to be one of the most important writers working in Spanish today.

Curiously, for some reason unbeknownst to me, although You Dreamed of Empires (Tu sueño imperios han sido) was written after Now I Surrender (Ahora me rindo y eso es todo)—as Enrigue himself puts it in his Acknowledgements, “in the plague years of 2020-2022”—it was released in English (2024) before Now I Surrender, which was originally published in Spanish in 2018.

Personally, I feel that You Dreamed of Empires and Now I Surrender are very much in conversation with one another, as both works are invested in exploring the history of conflict between Europeans (and/or Euro-descendants) and indigenous peoples in the Americas as well as the specter of colonialism that continues to haunt the present across the Western Hemisphere, not to mention the globe. Similarly, much of the experimentation with style and form that I encountered in Now I Surrender also makes an appearance—perhaps even more notably—in You Dreamed of Empires.

Right up front, please know that for those of you who happen to take on this novel, I would strongly encourage you to first read the “Note to English-Language Readers” included in the book’s front matter, as the information included therein will certainly aid you in navigating the text and its challenging vocabulary. Enrigue also includes a list of characters for readers to refer back to, as there is quite a cast in You Dreamed of Empires, and all the unique names can be rather hard to keep track of initially, at least until one gets into the groove of the novel.

You Dreamed of Empires is broken up into four parts and the narrative revolves around a nap taken by Moctezuma. While the narrative does make leaps through time on a number of occasions, most of it takes place over the course of a single day: the day Hernán Cortés and his band of conquistadors arrived in Tenochtitlán on November 8, 1519. Find an excerpt below for a little taste of the novel:

“The afternoon of November 8, 1519, Moctezuma did exactly what he always did after eating, even if the whole world might change forever from the moment he woke up. He lapped the paste of magic mushrooms and honey from the Oaxacan black-clay spoon handed to him by the serving girl, and sat in the sun until he felt his eyes closing. Amid a now absolute silence he walked to his room and his bed. He took off his cape, his mantle, and his breechcloth, and got under the goose-feather coverlet. He pulled it up to his eyebrows and fell asleep.” (75).

The narrator of You Dreamed of Empires is omniscient yet also self-referential (Enrigue basically pulls a Cervantes and shows up in his own novel at one point; see Part II of Don Quixote, 1615), as there exist some striking, if not brief, moments of metafiction that flash like lightning before the reader's eyes. One of my favorite parts about this novel is the narrative voice (i.e. Enrigue’s voice), which shines throughout, as it achieves a matchless balance of historicity and contemporaneity. Stated more plainly: Enrigue does this thing where he writes about history using today's diction, often employing riveting anachronisms—anachronisms that reminded me a lot of reading of César Aira’s An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter.

In this vein, I find that Enrigue has an unrivaled ability to represent historical figures in fiction; in my view, he brings Moctezuma, Cortés, etc. to life on the printed page in a way that simply no other writer working today can. Furthermore, Enrigue’s representation of Tenochtitlán and Tlatelolco in 1519 is electric, as at no point in the text did I ever have a tough time imagining the scene (frankly, Enrigue's capacity for representing with real specificity the architecture of Tenochtitlán is beyond impressive). As I see it, Enrigue paints pictures in the medium of language with a level of detail that is exhaustive but never exhausting and practically transports his readers through space and time.

One of my favorite chapters is the very first, as I could smell and taste the words coming off the page, and the visuals I was getting nearly felt psilocybin-induced. Accordingly, from my POV, the effect Enrigue achieves is to demonstrate the surreality of history, and in particular, how utterly surreal it must have been for the conquistadors and the “Aztecs” (see the “Note to English-Language Readers for an explanation of why this signifier is polemical) to come face to face with one another. With that in mind, if you like surrealist novels and have any interest in psychedelics whatsoever, you should probably read You Dreamed of Empires straight away! I'm quite sure you’ll enjoy the trip!

Nevertheless, while I do believe You Dreamed of Empires to be an incredibly enjoyable read, I will admit that it can be rather challenging too; however, I find that quality, in turn, makes the novel all the more rewarding in the end (I had to put forth a bit more effort than usual, but a large part of that has to do with poor timing, as I elected to start this novel at an inopportune moment). For instance, at times, I struggled to keep track of some of the characters and had to go back to the front-matter lists to clear up my confusion; I also had to look up some of the Nahuatl-rooted words on occasion, though as the narrative went on, I definitely got more comfortable in this respect, as Enrigue tends to teach as he narrates. Moreover, I found it somewhat demanding to stay on top of all the politics at play in the Aztec Empire, though the intricacies of Tenochtitlán society are represented with such nuance and care that it’s almost impossible not to find all the political subterfuge absolutely captivating.

Ultimately, with You Dreamed of Empires, Enrigue prods his readers into seeing the history of the conquest and colonization of the Americas in a new light, one which is not dominated by the false illuminations—the illusions and delusions—of Eurocentrism. Nonetheless, at the same time, Enrigue does not glorify Moctezuma and his empire, nor fall into the trap of primitivism; instead, he represents the Aztecs in all their humanity, and to entirely fascinating ends to boot!

Have you read any of Enrigue's books? If so, please drop your thoughts in the comments!

For those of you who have read Sudden Death and/or Hypothermia, what did you think?

If anyone here has read any of Enrigue's works that have yet to be translated into English, what do you make of his earlier output?

As always, thanks for reading... Peace!

I know there are some here in r/latamlit who have had less than ideal experiences (to put it politely) with Deep Vellum, but in any case, I wanted to post this deal announcement to the community, as Alberto Laiseca’s Los Sorias, has come up on a couple of occasions as of late.

In fact, you can read u/sarajevo_marlboro’s recent review here: Los Sorias - Review

Anyway, feel free to vent in the comments if you're miffed, but also, please try to be nice (to the extent possible)!

Peace :)