Reading News from the Empire with Ron Restrepo
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Reading News from the Empire with Ron Restrepo
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About this listen
This week on The Big Book Project, I’m joined by Ron Restrepo — Houston attorney, voracious reader of big books, and a board member of Deep Vellum — to dig into Fernando del Paso’s News from the Empire.
Del Paso’s 700-page novel takes on the doomed three-year reign of Maximilian and Carlota as Emperor and Empress of Mexico (1864–1867). But what makes the book remarkable isn’t the history — it’s how del Paso writes it. Twelve of the novel’s twenty-three chapters are monologues by an exiled, possibly mad Carlota, narrating from Bouchout Castle in Belgium, where she lived sixty years past her husband’s execution.
Ron and I talk about:
Why Carlota, not Maximilian, is the true center of the book
Del Paso’s interrogation of European imperialism — and his quieter interrogation of historiography itself
The parallel paths of Maximilian and Benito Juárez
How the Monroe Doctrine returns the moment the U.S. Civil War ends
Del Paso’s two years of research and his choice to be a “reliable narrator of the unreliable”
And a long, generous recommendation list: Yuri Herrera’s Season of the Swamp, Álvaro Enrigue’s You Dreamed of Empires, and Carlos Fuentes’s Terra Nostra
Watch above, or listen wherever you get your podcasts.
— Lori