Kindle. Translated by Natasha Wimmer. An imagining of the day Hernán Cortés encountered Moctezuma II. The characters serve mostly to explore the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan and the culture clash between the imperials/conquerors. Most of the book is setup, explaining how we got here and to an extent the prevailing politics. Most of the plot development occurs in the final pages where a drug reveals how (future) history actually went. It was hard to parse what impact Cortés's account of Christianity had on Moctezuma or its import to this story. Psychedelics feature prominently. There are two princesses who lack volition and much characterisation beyond their regality.
I enjoyed it on its own terms; more familiarity with the actual history may've yielded a richer experience but probably also an oversensitivity to Enrigue's infidelities and confabulations. It sort-of lays the groundwork for Francis Spufford's alt-history Cahokia Jazz (with some points of similarly like the emperor-of-the-sun and mayor-of-the-moon for instance). The horses here stand in for the variant strain of smallpox there.
Dwight Garner: quotidian. Quite. Anthony Cummins. Adam Mars-Jones summarises at vast length. (I don't think ant colonies are hierarchical.) Goodreads did not exactly love it.
