Dwight Garner in The New York Times:
The Mexican writer Álvaro Enrigue’s new novel has a soft, nebulous title: “You Dreamed of Empires.” Its cover is forgettable, too. Like nearly every book on the New Fiction table, it is all wavy patterns and beach-towel colors. This generic look has come to promise a) bright settings and b) young characters out to conquer racial and sexual threats as they perceive them. This would be excellent were it not for, as often as not, c) writing in which one is instructed how to feel at almost every moment.
What a treat, then, to find that “You Dreamed of Empires” is not wet but dry. It is also short, strange, spiky and sublime. It’s a historical novel, a great speckled bird of a story, set in 1519 in what is now Mexico City. Empires are in collision and the vibe is hallucinatory. The Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés has arrived with his troops and an enormous retinue, pesky supernumeraries who’ve attached themselves to him like remoras, or dingleberries.
He is expecting to meet the Aztec emperor Moctezuma, who is fearsome yet depressed. The aging Moctezuma tends to be either napping or maxed out on magic mushrooms — or both. Increasingly, he is getting in touch with what Homer Simpson referred to as his womanly needs. The kill count promises to be enormous. In the first scene we meet priests who casually wear human skin as veils. Their hair is crusted with layers of sacrificial blood; one has teeth “filed sharp as a cat’s.” Fickle gods must be appeased. Human sacrifice is common; hearts are ripped out, the unlucky cored as if they were apples. Strips of warrior loin are said, by 16th-century epicures, to be yummy on a tostada.
More here.