The author’s approach to this cataclysmic history is to shred it, reassemble it, and reframe it, offering the satisfactions of Westerns, historical epics, and metafiction even as he overturns all three traditions. Enrigue has a penchant for shooting the facts of history through a prism of the absurd. His 2013 novel, Sudden Death, about the forces that shaped Renaissance-era Europe, revolves around a fictional tennis match between the Italian painter Caravaggio and the Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo, who face off with a ball fabricated from Anne Boleyn’s hair. You Dreamed of Empires, published in 2022, imagines the encounter between the Aztec leader Moctezuma and the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés as a hallucinatory dream induced by mushrooms. In one startlingly funny scene, Moctezuma has a vision of Enrigue writing the novel.