NEW YORK, NY.- The Aug. 13, 2021, edition of The New York Times failed to mention the 500th anniversary of the fall of Tenochtitlan, the erstwhile Aztec capital out of which Mexico City was born. Álvaro Enrigue noticed. Of course.

Enrigue, 54, who grew up in Mexico City, believes that early meeting between Europe and the Americas changed the trajectory of global commerce, urbanism, industry and much else. Modernity itself, he argues, was born in the moment that Aztec emperor Montezuma and Hernan Cortés, the Spanish conquistador, first looked each other in the eye in 1519, a clash of empires that set in motion the city’s capture two years later.

“Not a single article, and it was the great city of the Americas at that time,” he said.

For Enrigue, the rise, fall and rebirth of Tenochtitlan is perhaps the foremost obsession in a lifetime full of them. In short stories, novels, essays and reviews, he has delved into the histories of Geronimo, Rubén Darío, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and 17th-century samurai transplants in Acapulco, to name a few. His 2016 novel, “Sudden Death,” imagined a tennis match between Caravaggio and Francisco de Quevedo using a ball made from Anne Boleyn’s hair.

Enrigue’s work is marked by an all-consuming attention to historical detail; he “needed to know how a Roman person tied his shoes, in order to write a book in which no one ties their shoes,” he said. But if Enrigue is perhaps overenthusiastic about his subjects, it is surely to his readers’ benefit. He is a preternaturally entertaining and erudite writer who builds alternate worlds from the minutiae. He also seems like he’s having a pretty good time.

“All of this comes out of the enormous pleasure of, as Sor Juana used to say, just learning things,” he said. “I research so hard because I enjoy it so much.”

Enrigue’s latest novel, “You Dreamed of Empires,” recasts that first meeting between Cortés and Montezuma alongside interpreters Malinalli and Gerónimo de Aguilar, Princess Atotoxtli, Spanish captain Jazmín Caldera (the only main character of Enrigue’s invention) and others. It’s a story that has fascinated him since he was 9 or 10, when workers happened across vestiges of the Aztecs in the center of Mexico City and excavations of the main temple of Tenochtitlan got underway.

“I began to research this novel in 1979,” he says before checking his enthusiasm slightly. “That sounds pathetic. No, I didn’t. But it has been a long love story.”

In writing “You Dreamed of Empires,” Enrigue relied on classic accounts of the meeting, including Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s “The True History of the Conquest of New Spain,” as well as the new wave of scholarship produced around the 500th anniversary of the city’s fall. He also took a tour of the excavations still taking place beneath Mexico City.

Enrigue says there are no good guys and bad guys in history, but he jokes that after seeing a tzompantli (a tower of skulls built from the victims of human sacrifice), “you begin to wonder.”

Enrigue wrote his first novel, “Death of an Installation Artist,” while working for a radio station during the Mexican peso crisis of the mid-1990s. Budget cuts, and the corresponding cuts to Enrigue’s hours, gave him time to write. Since then he has published six more novels, two short-story collections and a book of essays, and served as an editor at the Fondo de Cultura Económica, one of Latin America’s most important publishing houses.

Now an associate professor of romance languages and literatures at Hofstra University in New York, he said that part of his job is “spending all the time I want reading the most boring and specialized books” to satisfy his curiosities. Enrigue’s enthusiasms, however, extend beyond whatever research project he’s working on, said Laura Perciasepe, his editor at Riverhead Books.

“He writes the best emails,” she said. “Ask a mundane logistical question or just write to check in and he’ll come back with a life-transforming note about the history of empire, the travails of one of his cats or the woes of the Baltimore Orioles.”

Enrigue’s research and writing routine became ingrained while pursuing his doctorate at the University of Maryland under professors like Jorge Aguilar-Mora and José Emilio Pacheco, who shared the philosophy of “reading everything there was to read” in order to write, he said. The experience helped refine Enrigue’s style. After delivering a paper for Aguilar-Mora during a yearlong course in which he’d consumed as much as humanly possible on the Mexican Revolution, the professor invited him for a chat — and asked where Enrigue’s personality was hiding.

“He sat me down and said, ‘This is all, Enrigue? I invited you to Maryland because you are a novelist. Where is that person in this?’” he recalled. “That changed completely my point of view.”

Enrigue says that since then he has tried to “leave a register” of how his books are written. Often that means directly disrupting his readers’ ability to suspend disbelief. “Sudden Death” includes an email correspondence with Enrigue’s Spanish-language editor; “You Dreamed of Empires” begins with a note from Enrigue to Natasha Wimmer, his English translator, and Enrigue himself makes an appearance of sorts in the drama.

“The suspension of disbelief is a dumb superstition that constrains your power as a storyteller,” he said. “That’s not to say I don’t believe in plot. Plot is not a superstition but a courtesy.”

It is not surprising, then, that Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges is among Enrigue’s prime influences. “You Dreamed of Empires” is modeled, structurally, on the Borges story “The Secret Miracle,” in which a character “favored the verse form in the theater because it prevents the spectators from forgetting unreality.” Enrigue’s views on “19th-century traditions” for what novels are allowed to do may also be why it’s hard to call his work historical fiction. While the finer details of his books would almost certainly stand up to fact-checking, his stories gleefully color outside the lines of history as we know it.

“I can’t think of anyone who writes the way he does, who approaches history the way he does, with tenderness and irony, with such a keen eye for human detail and an ability to find humor in the biggest, darkest questions embedded in our past,” said Daniel Alarcón, a novelist and journalist who has known Enrigue for nearly two decades.

For his part, Enrigue believes his style may have something to do with his generation’s proximity to the writers of the so-called Latin American boom, the literary movement that brought figures like Gabriel García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes to the fore; before meeting his heroes (and realizing they were normal people), the younger Enrigue viewed them as “living gods,” he said.

“I think that we were oppressed and traumatized by this very close heaven of living writers that were still producing work,” he said, adding that mixing genre fiction with “the tics of what is considered prestigious literature” might be, in his case, “an impulse to create a safe space outside the totemic literature that was proposed by the giants of the ’60s and ’70s.”

The physical closeness to authors like Márquez and Fuentes — whom you could see “eating at the table next to you” in Mexico City, he said — and Juan Rulfo, who for added intimidation came from the same part of the country as his father’s family, may also be why Enrigue feels more secure that he can take inspiration from Borges “and return comfortably.”

“Borges was an author that I venerated but that I didn’t fear,” Enrigue said. “I think the author that I admired more is Rulfo, but I don’t even dare to go there.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.