You Dreamed of Empires

4 stars: loved this book, would recommend

Spoiler free version

Edit: I guess I never mentioned that this book is about the day that Moctezuma met with Cortez and all the things that were going on that day. One chapter is Moctezuma taking a nap

On one level this is a work of historical fiction. I love historical fiction, though I haven't read much of it since high school. Especially the political kind, and we've got all the things you'd expect of historical fiction in an imperial court: a mercurial, autocratic, deeply flawed ruler; a court full of people who live and die by their wits, some sympathetic, some not; constant danger and the threat of violence amidst the beauty of one of the great cities of the world, and even in this case a crisis brought on by the barbarians at the gates. I find myself really wanting to read more historical fiction after this, specifically set in one of the many ancient empires of Mesoamerica or South America, there is so much potential there.

It's described as anti colonial- there are several ways this is true, but one thing in particular is how it portrays the people incorrectly referred to as the Aztecs as a complex group with their own agendas, and with the Spanish being kind of secondary to it all. Just getting to hear the story from their perspective was great.

The names are a little hard to follow. I invented mnemonics to keep them straight. But I've seen much worse, at least the names are all distinct. It seems like a bad criticism of the book.

There's a lot more going on. I feel like I need to reread to fully understand it - in particular I'm not sure what the ant was about. A lot of people do a lot of drugs as the story goes on, including it seems the narrator, and I feel like it could use a few reads to wrap my head around it.

I've been waiting to update my understanding of Cortes and Moctezuma ever since Neil Young mistold it to me at a concert in 1986 in his equally hallucinatory take on the meeting in his song Cortez the Killer. This book doesn't have that crazy horse guitar solo, or the weird insertion of a woman into the lyrics that Neil knows is somehow "living there, and she loves me to this day. I still can't remember when or how I lost my way.", but it does have wicked and funny court farces and lots of Spanish buffoonery. I was sober at the Neil Young concert because I was 15 and went with a friends father who dreamed of an accountant son. If I could do it all over again I'd have ingested plenty of psychoactive plants or mushrooms at both the concert and my reading of this good book to help complete my white guy understanding of this historic moment in the only way it can be understood after empires fall and colonialism erases - as an inherently selfish hallucination.