Apr 1, 2026 · 1 hr 12 min · 19 segments
Valeria Luiselli joins Deborah Treisman to discuss “The Night Face Up,” by Julio Cortázar, which was published in The New Yorker in 1967. Luiselli is the author of five books, including the nonfiction…
Deborah TreismanHostNo entities detected.
So, um, for people who do not know this story, there's an element of it that might be sort of mystifying if you don't know what it is, and that's, um, what's referred to in the story as the War of the Blossom.
Yeah, the f- the, yeah, the, the War of the Blossom is not something maybe anyone might have heard of because, uh, I don't think it exists as such with that name.
It's usually in English, I think, referred to as the Flower Wars, and in Spanish they're called Las Guerras Floridas.
And Las Guerras Floridas, or the Flower Wars, were a series of ritual or ritualized wars during the final period of the Aztec Empire, when the empire was already in decadence, and there were brutal famines, and, you know, social revolt was always bubbling.
And as with most empires in decadence, the ruling class resorted to extreme measures, you know, like mass detention or throwing bombs, or in this case, human sacrifice.
So what happened in the Flower Wars was that the rival, uh, groups would come together, and they would have a set of very clear rules to follow.
Different weapons were used, not the usual, so they would use smaller swords with s- with-
And whoever lost those wars would be taken prisoner and then, uh, brought up to the temples where human sacrifices occurred and, and would be killed in, in the stones of the, of the temple.
So that was, uh, the kind of, the, the, the arc, the narrative arc of the [laughs] of, of-
So, um, for people who do not know this story, there's an element of it that might be sort of mystifying if you don't know what it is, and that's, um, what's referred to in the story as the War of the Blossom.
Yeah, the f- the, yeah, the, the War of the Blossom is not something maybe anyone might have heard of because, uh, I don't think it exists as such with that name.
It's usually in English, I think, referred to as the Flower Wars, and in Spanish they're called Las Guerras Floridas.
And Las Guerras Floridas, or the Flower Wars, were a series of ritual or ritualized wars during the final period of the Aztec Empire, when the empire was already in decadence, and there were brutal famines, and, you know, social revolt was always bubbling.
And as with most empires in decadence, the ruling class resorted to extreme measures, you know, like mass detention or throwing bombs, or in this case, human sacrifice.
So what happened in the Flower Wars was that the rival, uh, groups would come together, and they would have a set of very clear rules to follow.
Different weapons were used, not the usual, so they would use smaller swords with s- with-
And whoever lost those wars would be taken prisoner and then, uh, brought up to the temples where human sacrifices occurred and, and would be killed in, in the stones of the, of the temple.
So that was, uh, the kind of, the, the, the arc, the narrative arc of the [laughs] of, of-
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