It was Hernán Cortés who made the ludicrous declare that Moctezuma voluntarily surrendered sovereignty of the Aztec empire to the Spanish conquistadores. Cortés’ narrative just isn’t simply believed, particularly contemplating that he quotes Moctezuma as referencing the Christian Bible, however definitely there are those that consider that the Aztec folks, both out of naiveté or superstition, may have been duped into a foul discount.
Mexican author Alvaro Enrigue’s agile modernist novel You Dreamed of Empires presents a reimagined encounter between Cortés and Moctezuma, with way more political machination at work than superstition. It all kicks off with the Spaniard making an attempt to hug the Aztec emperor on first greeting—a foul transfer contemplating Moctezuma’s impulsivity and luxury with executions. Although the second in some way doesn’t finish in blood, readers know that the final word final result will undoubtedly be catastrophe.
Over the course of someday in November 1519, conquistadores bumble across the labyrinthine metropolis of Mehxicoh-Tenoxtitlan. Their horses, misplaced in Moctezuma’s palace, are a novelty to their hosts however sadly decimate the emperor’s assortment of unique fruits. Meanwhile, Moctezuma languishes in his room, treating his melancholy with hallucinogenic mushrooms and cacti, whereas his sister (and spouse) Atotoxtli tries to determine easy methods to save the dominion. “If there’s anything Spaniards and Mexicans have always agreed upon,” Enrigue writes, “it’s that nobody is less qualified to govern than the government itself.”
Readers of Enrigue’s 2016 novel Sudden Death have already encountered his approach of coping with lopsided accounts of Latin American historical past. In each books, there are translator characters intentionally mistranslating, easy comparisons to the Roman empire, loads of feathered capes and a porous fourth wall. On a number of events, Enrigue yanks us out of the story to take a look at occasions from our Twenty first-century vantage level, similar to when Moctezuma is admiring the sound of withered fingers swaying within the breeze “to the beat of some music he couldn’t place,” and we be taught that it’s the 1973 track “Monolith” by T. Rex. And as fantastically written because the novel is, particularly in its descriptions of the metropolis of Tenoxtitlan, You Dreamed of Empires can be bone-dry humorous: “In Mexico, authority has always flowed from the smack of a flip-flop.”
When historical past is retold in such an irreverent, unprecious method, there are not any winners—besides the reader.
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