That story had yet to be told. The more I learned about the camera obscura’s cultural history in the 18th century, the more I wanted to reveal what to me are its most compelling attributes: with their centuries-old mechanisms, camera obscuras free you to transform spaces into realms of the imagination that root you more deeply into both a physical and a mental space. By giving you direct and intimate access to inner spaces, camera obscuras render external worlds the user’s own dominion. In this way, the device helped me answer questions at the heart of my book: Why does spending time in certain spaces make us feel more connected to our thoughts and feelings? How did minds and spaces come to be linked, to such an extent that representing everyday physical settings in painting and literature became a critical maneuver in developing a realistic sense of inner life? “Spatial formalism” is the term I developed in my book for this approach to the inextricable material links between space and psyche.
“Sorry we’re late!” Vivian announced.
“Strip search?” one of the men joked.
“Parking,” I said.
A collective groan. The goddamned parking.
In what he refers to as a “sort of epilogue” to his colossal novel, The Suicide Museum, Ariel Dorfman thanks the Spanish author Javier Cercas for the use of this quotation which appears as an epigraph: “Epic, history, poetry, the essay, journalism, memoirs: these are some of the genres that the novel has swallowed throughout its history.”
The quote is an appropriate primer for what is to come in the nearly 700 pages that follow. Dorfman’s prodigious body of work includes fiction, memoirs, essays, poetry, and plays (including Death and the Maiden), and clearly distinguishes him as an unusually versatile and prolific writer who moves between genres with the same grace he moves between continents, languages, and cultures.
With a plot full of trickery, sleight of hand, soaring ambitions, dangerous rivalries and heartfelt passions, the action bowls along at a fine pace, taking us on a memorable journey through a richly imagined world and a spectacular cast of characters.
You Dreamed of Empires, the latest novel from Álvaro Enrigue, newly translated by Natasha Wimmer, is a story built on what-ifs. Set entirely on the day in 1519 when Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés was welcomed into the palace of Moctezuma, ruler of Tenochtitlan, in what is now Mexico City, Enrigue spins a seductive tale despite the fact that everyone already knows how, in reality, it ends—spoiler alert: Spain won. And yet, immersed in the world Enrigue builds, we read beyond the shadow of this ending hoping that just maybe, this time around, the story will be different. In his hallucinatory prose, anything could happen.