On November 8, 1519, a few hundred Castilian soldiers and horsemen led by Hernán Cortés entered the magnificent city of Tenochtitlan. The city, larger than most European capitals at the time, seemed to shimmer and float atop Lake Texcoco. Recording this fateful encounter in his True History of the Conquest of New Spain, Bernal Díaz del Castillo wrote that he and his fellow soldiers wondered “if what they were seeing was perhaps a dream.”

We all know how this particular dream ends: Two years after their grand entrance into Tenochtitlan, Díaz and his fellow soldiers destroyed the city. By the time he sat down to write his history five decades later, Díaz was describing a society that was “overthrown and lost,” with “nothing left standing.” Today, Tenochtitlan’s remains are buried beneath the teeming streets of Mexico City.

Álvaro Enrigue’s latest novel, You Dreamed of Empires, takes place on the day of the Castilians’ arrival in the city. By depicting a moment when many outcomes were still possible—the Spanish invaders, vastly outnumbered, could easily have been killed—the novel tells a history without victors and losers. In doing so, it makes histories like Díaz’s just another story.

Enrigue has long been fascinated by the slippery relationship between history, mythmaking, and literature. Over the course of seven novels and two story collections, his fiction has playfully interrogated the way that families—and nations—construct the past through shared stories. In Spanish, historia means both “history” and “story,” and Enrigue stands in a long line of Latin American novelists whose work examines the distorting impact that these retellings can have on the present.

You Dreamed of Empires seeks to unsettle a central origin story of the Mexican nation. On the day of their fateful arrival, the Castilians—or “Caxtilteca,” as the narrator refers to them—are not yet conquerors but rather invited guests of the all-powerful Mexica ruler, Moctezuma Xocoyotzin. Suspicions abound on all sides. Moctezuma’s advisers are concerned that their leader—a habitual user of heavy-duty psychedelics who is fascinated by the Castilians’ horses—is insufficiently attuned to the threat posed by the newcomers, who have recently massacred thousands of the Mexica’s allies in nearby Cholula. The Castilians, meanwhile, fear that the arrogant and inscrutable Cortés has led them into a trap that will surely end in their slaughter at the hands of Moctezuma’s fearsome warriors.

In chapters that alternate between the Mexica and Castilian perspectives, the familiar contours of the historical record are continually interrupted—at first subtly, then with increasing stridency as the day draws to a close with a diplomatic meeting between Cortés and Moctezuma. As the narrative becomes stranger, the novel asks: Is every account of the past a work of imagination?

Born in Guadalajara in 1969 and raised in Mexico City, Enrigue made a notable debut with his first novel, La muerte de un instalador—a biting satire of the Mexican art-world elite that was published by Joaquín Moritz, the famed publishing house that established a prior generation of Mexican heavyweights, such as José Emilio Pacheco, Salvador Elizondo, and Rosario Castellanos. By his next novel, El cementerio de sillas, Enrigue had established his recurring fascination with history: Its protagonist locks himself in his Mexico City apartment in order to divine the secret history of his ancestors.

Beginning with his 2008 novel, Vidas perpendiculares—whose mute protagonist’s life story is interrupted by a cascade of seemingly disconnected capsule portraits of people from across civilizations and centuries—Enrigue blended this interest in the past with a distinctive style. His novels since then have all featured a chatty, bemused, and omniscient first-person narrator whose keen eye for irony belies his unyielding control over each story’s mechanics. This layered perspective, more intimate than third-person narration and less enveloping than first-person, puts Enrigue’s narrator in the perpetual position of an unusually charming dinner-party companion. (It is this charm, I think, that prevents one from minding too much that his characters—be they Mongolian child brides, hardscrabble north Mexican ranchers, or US Army captains—all tend to use the same slang-laden idiom.)

Though he has lived in the United States and taught at American universities since the early 2000s, Enrigue’s reputation in the Anglosphere is tied to Natasha Wimmer’s 2016 translation of his novel Muerte súbita (Sudden Death). Loosely structured around a tennis match between Caravaggio and the Spanish Golden Age poet Francisco de Quevedo, Sudden Death marked the first time that Enrigue made fiction from the lives of historical figures—including the major figures of the Spanish conquest of Mexico. Though the novel roams widely across the history of Renaissance Europe, it suggests that high European culture would be unimaginable without the forceful dispossession of Indigenous Americans.

Enrigue continued to explore this theme in his next novel, Ahora me rindo y eso es todo (2018). Structured around a western-style kidnapping plot, and interwoven with a chronicle of the narrator’s road trip to the US Southwest with his partner and their children as they await their green cards, the novel is intercut with fictionalized episodes from the lives of the final independent generation of the Chiricahua Apache—and of the Mexican and US forces who steadily pressed in on them from all sides as they both consolidated their national projects over the 19th century.

Compared with these earlier novels, You Dreamed of Empires takes place on a substantially more contained stage. Though he maintains his chatty style, Enrigue drops the braided narratives, tones down the metafictional asides, and focuses the action squarely on a single day. At first, this emphasis on “straight” historical fiction feels disorienting, even pallid. Yet Enrigue’s embrace of the genre soon makes a radical departure from the historical record. Seen in this light, You Dreamed of Empires is the culmination of a decades-long project of burrowing into the past. Rather than retelling history in his own way, Enrigue sets out to rewrite it.

Like Díaz, whose 16th-century True History was written in response to a hagiographic biography of Cortés, Enrigue’s narrator spends the first half of the book insisting on accuracy, on correcting the record. Some of these corrections are familiar in our statue-smashing age: Cortés is not a dashing, brilliant hero but rather an “ill-favored and artless son of Extremadura.” Other interventions are considerably more learned. Atotoxtli, Moctezuma’s wife, was indeed his sister, but theirs was a symbolic marriage meant to ensure imperial stability. Describing the complex web of interethnic marriage among Tenochtitlan’s nobility, the narrator wryly notes that “the English historians of the nineteenth century, who really had no clue, would call them Aztecs to solve the problem, and it stuck.”