One of the pleasures of reading widely in translation is getting to juxtapose books from completely different literary traditions, letting them inform each other in a new language in ways they could not do in the original.
You Dreamed of Empire is a counterfactual history of Hernan Cortes' arrival at Moctezuma's court. It's also a drug novel. Moctezuma is high on mushrooms for the whole book. In one climactic scene, he and Cortes take peyote together...
History, he went on, lets him "take a step back, through metaphor," in his analysis of the present. In his latest novel, You Dreamed of Empires...
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