Big City Life in Translation

As I search for the thread that might unite the following three novels (aside from the coincidence that I read them all in the past month or so), I realize that they are all portraits of life in big cities wherein differences in class and culture play a pivotal role in initiating the engine of each story, albeit three wildly different cities, spread across time and space: 16th century Tenoxtitlan (also known as Mexico City), 20th century Rio de Janeiro, and 21st century Berlin. They’re also beautifully crafted and very satisfying novels to read—I hope you’ll find one or more to add to your 2026 TBR pile!

You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue, translated by Natasha Wimmer

In the end, the encounter was mostly disappointing, neither memorable nor fruitful. It left no one satisfied. The conquistadores were disappointed by the brevity of the ceremony and Moctezuma’s blatant lack of interest in hearing the message from Charles I, and the Mexica were confused that the huey tlatoani had finally decided to leave his chambers only to meet this pack of clowns. If there’s anything Spaniards and Mexicans have always agreed upon, it’s that nobody is less qualified to govern than the government itself.

Lately, I’ve been feeling like Jorge Luis Borges is haunting many of the books I’ve been reading—Hernán Díaz wrote a whole book on Borges, for example, and I’m pretty sure Mariana Enríquez mentions him twice by name in Our Share of Night. It turns out that the architecture of this novel is inspired by a Borges story called “The Secret Miracle,” in which a moment of history is dilated. Even the way I came to read it felt a little Borgesian—evocative of his short story, “The Book of Sand,” which is about a man who buys an infinite book on impulse from a Bible salesman—in that I didn’t seek this book out so much as it found me.

I was in my local library’s thrift bookstore, and the volunteer was clearly eager to leave. (The bookstore closed at two, and at ten ‘til, she announced there were five minutes left.) She started putting her coat on at 1:55, whereupon I frantically scanned the fiction shelves and saw this bright cover facing outward. For one dollar, I had little to lose, so I snatched it up.

This book surprised me with its playfulness and unusual structure. It opens with a note to the translator and features two translators as main characters—an early nod to the pivotal role that translation and intercultural communication play in the plot. The names are at times a challenge to track, as many characters go by multiple names or titles—this is a highly intentional choice on Enrigue’s part, and I definitely had a moment about three-quarters of the way through the book where this clicked for me. I also discovered yet another fantastic two-hour-plus interview between Enrigue and David Naimon which sheds additional light on Enrigue’s process and intentions.

The novel mostly takes place during the afternoon of November 8, 1519, when Hernando Cortes and several of his captains and his translator are hosted by Monteczuma. Enrigue takes great care with the way he represents the story’s historical elements—like the role of ritual cannibalism, with a mind to showing both Indigenous and European perspectives—even if he is also emphatic that it is a novel and should not be read as history. By the end, however, the present/future interacts with the past in some fascinating (and Borgesian) ways. It took a little while to lock in, but once I was generally oriented to the characters and immediate situation, the book kept getting better and better. Enrigue says in the Naimon interview that he really wanted to bring the ancient city of Tenoxtitlan to life for the reader (here’s a series of fantastic images gathered on Wikipedia to give you some sense of the city in case you are not already familiar with its unique geography), and I think Enrigue achieves his goal. I came away with the sense that I had awakened from a long nap full of dreams so vivid and immersive I can’t shake the sense that they might have been real.

He has another historical novel, Now I Surrender, coming out in English translation on March 3, 2026. I’m looking forward to checking it out.

Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector, translated by Benjamin Moser

The fact is I hold a destiny in my hands yet don’t feel powerful enough to invent freely: I follow a hidden, fatal line. I have to seek a truth that is beyond me. Why should I write about a young girl whose poverty isn’t even adorned? Maybe because within her there’s a seclusion and also because in the poverty of body and spirit I touch holiness, I who want to feel the breath of my beyond. To be more than I am, since I am so little.

It’s always interesting to me when the work of a writer who is no longer alive suddenly becomes very popular (I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman is another book that in this category, though I haven’t been able to read Harpman’s novel yet as it’s been backordered every time I’ve looked for it online and there are currently 75 holds on it at my local library). I’ve seen and heard Lispector’s work recommended frequently over the past few years and decided it was time to investigate.

Hour of the Star was her last published book, and it seems to be the one most commonly recommended as both her best and a good starting place. That said, at 77 pages, the novel is so slight that I was a little disappointed when it arrived in the mail. But the hype for it is deserved: it’s an incredible book, unique in its structure and framing, and distinctive in its prose style. I also think it will bear up well to rereading.

In the translator’s note at the end (which I wouldn’t have minded reading at the beginning), Benjamin Moser discusses the challenges of translating Lispector’s penchant for unconventional word choices and sentence structures. He writes, “Paradoxically, the better one’s Portuguese, the more difficult it is to read Clarice Lispector…This is because her subtle rearrangements of everyday language are so surprising that they often baffle the reader, particularly the reader with little experience of her work.” In Moser’s English translation, I did not find Lispector’s prose baffling at all, but I did have that sense of delight that comes with reading a writer with a distinctive vision and voice. It didn’t feel like anything else I’ve read lately, and I especially loved its meta elements.

I won’t tell you much about the plot except that the story follows a young woman living on the edges of Brazilian society, told from the point of view of an unnamed narrator who is haunted by her. And both the story of the young woman and the surrounding frame are richly developed, even within this narrow span of pages.

Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, translated by Sophie Hughes

Every so often you would glimpse the figure of a man—and it was always a man—standing at the kitchen counter, dressed in dark clothes and slowly sipping from a wine glass. They moved with an almost unreal slowness. They seemed trapped in a pocket of light in the darkness of the city, as if in a fish tank. But if Anna and Tom watched them for too long the perspective would reverse and suddenly they would be overcome, dizzied, by the feeling that it was they who were trapped.

Here’s another novel in translation (hence this month’s theme), this one translated by Sophie Hughes, the same person who translated Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor, which is how I discovered it. Like Hour of the Star, Perfection is a very short read with stellar—pun intended—prose; I think I read Hour of the Star in one evening, and this one over just two or three days. It’s told from an interesting perspective: a kind of close third person attached to a millennial couple, Anna and Tom, with very strong bougie white hipster vibes. They’re from an unnamed southern European country and have made a life in Berlin as part of an early wave of gentrification, and as prices rise and the neighborhood shifts around them, they wax nostalgic about the way things used to be, confronting a certain level of disappointment about the life they’ve curated for themselves.

In brief, Perfection reminds me of this Cavafy poem I love, but fleshed out in contemporary novel form. I also appreciate how Latronico charts a very particular kind of contemporary ennui borne of the endless pursuit of optimization while crouched over laptops, cobbling together gig and contract work. His approach to satirizing this couple is quite deft—both subtle and completely obvious, which is a remarkable balance to achieve. He treats them as a unit, not quite differentiating between them, which sounds weird but worked for me, especially in the way they tend to reinforce each other’s hopes and anxieties.

When I first read the ending, I will confess I was deeply annoyed that Latronico gives Anna and Tom that particular fate—but a week or so later (because this book was still buzzing around in my head, to its credit), I changed my mind and decided the ending is actually brilliant and satisfying (even if it’s still completely obnoxious).

Until next time,

Jules