Sometimes you don’t know just how much you don’t know.
I came to that realization while reading “You Dreamed of Empires,” Álvaro Enrigue’s excellent new novel (translated by Natasha Wimmer) about the 1519 meeting between the Aztec emperor Moctezuma and Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés in Tenochtitlan – today’s Mexico City.
As I got caught up in Enrigue’s book, it occurred to me that I wasn’t all that clear on the details of this incredibly significant encounter, one of the most momentous in all human history.
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Instead of facts, my understanding seemed to be a patchy mix of pop culture references, Werner Herzog’s “Aguirre, the Wrath of God,” and Neil Young’s song “Cortez the Killer.” But I’d long understood that what I’d been taught as a child – especially compared to stories of English and European history – had been an extremely oversimplified and sanitized version of events that played down both the horrors of colonial genocide, slavery and sexual predation and the richness of the indigenous cultures, societies and traditions.
Enrigue, a professor of 16th and 17th century literature, not only knows the scholarship surrounding the meeting, but he also deploys his strengths as a novelist to create an urgency to the story that feels immediate.
By the time I’d finished reading the novel, I wanted to know more. Thankfully, Enrigue led me to some good recent books – and this being 2024 – a podcast, too.
In the acknowledgments, Enrigue recommends the work of several historians, which is where I learned about Matthew Restall’s 2018 book “When Montezuma Met Cortés: The True Story of the Meeting That Changed History” and Camilla Townsend’s “Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs.” Both are excellent and explore the story in different ways.
Restall has no patience for allowing centuries of falsehoods or made-up “facts” to stand; he scrapes away at built-up myths to get down to what is more accurate, more truthful and, often, more interesting – especially as he writes about Cortés and his pre-expedition life. Aiming to discern what is fact and what is not, Restall does battle with B.S. and the reader is the winner.
“Note that this book is not a synthesis of previous accounts, another telling of the tale albeit from a different angle,” Restall writes in his introduction. “Rather, it is a reevaluation of previous accounts stretching from the 1520s to the present; an examination not just of the events of the Conquest story but of their half-millennium afterlife; an argument for seeing the traditional narrative of the ‘Conquest of Mexico’ as one of human history’s great lies, whose exposure requires us to better grasp both what really happened at the time and why the traditional narrative has prospered.”
Townsend, who based her work on Nahuatl-language annals or histories, aims to course-correct our understanding with a comprehensive study of the culture and civilization of the Aztec, or Mexica, people.
“The Aztecs would never recognize themselves in the picture of their world that exists in the books and movies we have made,” she writes.
She describes an a-ha moment that she experienced 15 years ago, offering up a particularly vivid account of library usage here.
“Libraries are generally though to be very quiet places, whether they shelter stacks of rare, leather-bound books or rows of computers. Another way to think of a library, however, is as a world of frozen voices, captured and rendered accessible forever by one of the most powerful human developments of all time – the act of writing. From that perspective, a library suddenly becomes a very noisy place,” Townsend writes.
Both books have been excellent companions to Enrigue’s novel and would be excellent reads on their own, but I also added another sideproject: The podcast “The Rest Is History,” which recently presented an 8-part series on the meeting of Cortés and Montezuma. Hosts Tom Holland (no, not that one) and Dominic Sandbrook are knowledgeable, sometimes irreverent guides who provide an informative introduction to the story, its variations and more.
So that’s how I got here. I’d been attracted to “You Dreamed of Empires” because it’s a slim book on a fascinating topic, one I knew little about. While I thought it would be a quick, informative read, it’s opened me up to so much more – including possibly “Not Even the Dead,” a 2023 novel about a Spanish conquistador by Juan Gomez Barcena (translated by Katie Whittemore) that I’ve had my eye on.
But I know I’m not the only one who does this, so I’d love to hear about your own deep dives for a possible future column.
Prudence Peiffer on the secret life of the text
Prudence Peiffer, whose work has appeared in the New York Times, New York Review of Books and Bookforum, is the author of “The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever,” which was longlisted for the National Book Award. Peiffer, who earned a PhD from Harvard University and a postdoctorate fellowship at Columbia University, was senior editor at Artforum and is now managing editor of the creative team at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She took the Book Pages Q&A.
Q. What are you reading now?
I’m currently reading Justin Torres’s “Blackouts” and Anne Enright’s “Wren, Wren.” And for another project, related to some of the themes in “The Slip” around solitude and creativity, I just read James Baldwin’s essay on the creative process, which is a quick, powerful gut punch.
Q. How do you decide what to read next?
I was attempting to read all my fellow longlisters for the National Book Award this year in various genres, but that proved a little too ambitious. But everything I’ve read off that list has been a revelation. Usually, one book leads to another. I also post the books I’ve read on my Instagram, and friends will say, “Oh you have to read this related book” or “I think you’d like x book,” and that will lead me to my next book. And I read a lot of reviews and recommendations from writers I admire, including my sister, Siobhan Phillips. The more you read the more you realize you haven’t read.
Q. Do you remember the first book that made an impact on you?
I grew up in a house without television (or heat), so books were a central part of my childhood. I have a vivid memory of my parents reading “The Incredible Journey” out loud to me and my siblings at bedtime and my father started crying at the ending, where the animals are returning, and my mother had to take over, and then she started crying, too. It was one of the rare times I saw my father cry in childhood and it made a huge impression on me – that a book could move you in that way, that it was OK to be so moved. I also thought a lot about “Farmer Boy” as a kid, from the Laura Ingalls Wilder series. His life was difficult and disciplined, full of so many chores, and yet somehow there’s joy and wonder about growing up in the telling too. That stayed with me as a young reader, I think because it also put my own life in perspective.
Q. What’s something – a fact, a bit of dialogue or something else – that has stayed with you from a recent reading?
My mind is filled with visceral animal facts from “Ranger Rick” magazine and other books my 6-year-old is reading, such as that a frog swallows with help from its eyeball. Other things that have stayed with me hit closer to home. I recently read Annie Ernaux’s “Getting Lost,” and a quote from a profile of Ernaux by another great writer, Rachel Cusk, in the New York Times stuck with me: “If it remains difficult for women to make art about their own lives, it is because femininity still has no stable place in culture.”
Q. Do you have any favorite book covers?
Sheila Heti’s “Pure Colour” has a near-perfect book cover. That wabi-sabi deliciously green Ellsworth Kelly form!
Q. Is there a genre or type of book you read the most – and what would you like to read more of?
I read a lot of novels. I also really love writers’ journals, especially to pick up and dip into on occasion. In high school, I got into the notebooks of Albert Camus (as one does – ha). His novels never moved me but I found sections of his notebooks to be extraordinary – about art, suffering, money. I still quote them often. Anne Truitt’s “Day Book” is an exceptional, honest journal of a working artist and I also return to sections of it often.
Q. What do you find the most appealing in a book: the plot, the language, the cover, a recommendation? Do you have any examples?
Always the characters and their setting, so it’s probably not such a big surprise that place plays such an important role in “The Slip.” The obscure little street in downtown New York is as much a character as the artists who lived on it, and I wanted that kind of reciprocal relationship so you got a sense of what their life was really like there. It’s a challenge writing nonfiction, but I was very lucky that so many of the artists kept journals or wrote letters with colorful details of their time at Coenties Slip.
I often cannot remember the plot of books I loved, but I always remember the mood that they conjured, where they took me. A recent novel that had such a terrific sense of setting was “The Children’s Bible” by Lydia Millet, as well as Claire Keegan’s “Small Things Like These” and Tove Ditlevsen’s “The Copenhagen Trilogy.” In all of these stories, the people and the setting are what moved me most and kind of scrambled present reality for a little while after I put the book down. Poetry does that for me too.
Q. What’s something about your book that no one knows?
I had to buy a lot of books while I was researching and writing “The Slip” because in the deep pandemic all the libraries and research archives were closed. (Even as, pretty early on, the New York and Brooklyn Public Libraries were incredible at allowing you to request books for pick up.) I found a rare book about a supporting character in “The Slip” – it was one of those things where I wasn’t sure if it would be helpful or not but I just went for it and ordered it from an obscure historical website because sometimes these wild goose chases lead to the most wonderful, strange detail to include. In any case, the book never showed up; my follow-up emails went unanswered. And I couldn’t find any other copies of the book anywhere. So that was just a lost story. It would have been a tangent anyway, so I let it go, but I do still wonder who ended up reading that book, or if it ever even existed.
Also, because I had three kids during “The Slip”’s own gestation, I think about all the life that happened just outside of the page that only I knew about. Like: kids playing at my feet (or having meltdowns); the nursing breaks or sections edited with a sleeping baby in my arms; the paragraphs interrupted by bouts of sickness. It’s the secret life of the text, which becomes something apart from you, bigger, more resilient, thank god, but hopefully, in the case of “The Slip,” still full of another kind of truth about making something.
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