{"id":59915,"date":"2025-06-06T10:00:39","date_gmt":"2025-06-06T15:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/?p=59915"},"modified":"2026-01-16T20:10:16","modified_gmt":"2026-01-17T02:10:16","slug":"we-better-laugh-about-it-alvaro-enrigue-and-maia-giladi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/we-better-laugh-about-it-alvaro-enrigue-and-maia-giladi\/","title":{"rendered":"We Better Laugh About It: \u00c1lvaro Enrigue and Maia Gil\u2019Ad\u00ed"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our partner podcast <\/em>Novel Dialogue<\/a> invites a novelist and a literary critic to talk about novels from every angle: how we read them, write them, publish them, and remember them. This season\u2019s signature question is: If\u00a0you could spend a year anywhere, where, when, and how would you spend it?<\/em><\/p>\n

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\u00c1lvaro Enrigue and critic Maia Gil\u2019Ad\u00ed begin their conversation considering translation as a living process, one that is internal to the novel form. \u00c1lvaro, author of the trippy\u00a0You Dreamed of Empires<\/em>, explains how the opening letter to his translator Natasha mirrors the letter to his editor, Teresa, in Spanish, and how both letters become part of the fiction. Fitting for a novel that crosses Nahua and Mayan, Moctezuma and Cort\u00e9s, Mexican history and the glam rock band T. Rex. The English translation\u2014which \u00c1lvaro calls the book of Natasha\u2014is longer, filled with changes and additions and revisions, and so translation becomes \u201canother life for the book.\u201d From the living book to its contents, Maia asks how\u00a0You Dreamed of Empires<\/em>\u00a0blends the gorgeous and the grotesque, slapstick humor and extreme violence, historical detail and mischievous metafictional departures. \u00c1lvaro links his work to Season 9\u2019s theme of TECH by pointing out the novel\u2019s longstanding use as a tool to laugh about the powerful, to tell them that what they\u2019re saying is not true, and to articulate politics through contradiction and humor. After discussing the encounter of Moctezuma and Cort\u00e9s (or really, of their translators, including a very magical bite of cactus) as the moment that changes everything in history, \u00c1lvaro makes a surprising historical swerve in his answer to this season\u2019s signature question.<\/p>\n