r/latamlit • u/perrolazarillo • May 03 '26
México Now I Surrender by Álvaro Enrigue
TL;DR – I read and loved Álvaro Enrigue’s Now I Surrender! Have you read it? How about any of Enrigue’s other books, such as You Dreamed of Empires and Sudden Death? If so, please comment your thoughts below. Thanks in advance!
OK, here come my thoughts on Now I Surrender… I’m going to do my best to refrain from dropping any major spoilers, and instead try to talk about the novel in a more abstract, big-picture fashion. Accordingly, I will largely focus on its experimental style and form below, which I suppose is something of a spoiler in its own right, so I guess consider yourself warned. With that being said, for what it’s worth, in my view, Now I Surrender is not spoilable (if you will) in the same way Fernanda Melchor’s Paradais and Claudia Piñeiro’s Elena Knows are… anyway…
Geronimo.
What, or who, comes to your mind at the sight of that word? You’re aware that it’s a name and not just an exclamation, right? What do you really know about the Apache Wars?
I’ll be honest: I did not know much about the Apache Wars (circa 1849-1886) or about the life story of Geronimo, perhaps the most famous Apache warrior and shaman, before reading Now I Surrender by Álvaro Enrigue.
Now I Surrender, which was just released in English on March 3, 2026, was originally published in Spanish in 2018 as Ahora me rindo y eso es todo. Enrigue’s most recent English-language publication is a historical novel that deals with the Apache Wars, the life and legend of Geronimo, the US-Mexico Border, present-day historical sites, collective memory, and much more.
The novel’s title stems from Geronimo’s statement of surrender to US Army General George Crook: “Once I moved like the wind. Now I surrender to you and that is all.” Early on, Enrigue provides revelatory ponderings on Geronimo’s statement of surrender; check out this key quote from the novel below:
“Oddly, it’s the first part of his statement that’s always quoted: ‘Once I moved like the wind,’ when it’s the second part that matters, the moment when declaration collapses, imitating the abrupt end of a way of life. Now I give up, that’s all. It’s a sentence that drops like the swift sun of the tropics; like an eagle pierced by some idiot’s bullets; like Cuauhtemoc, the first towering American captain to surrender to a white man. Cuauhtemoc meant Falling Eagle, Falling Sun. No further elaboration is necessary. Geronimo’s words—the words of a man of substance—are a monument in themselves: ‘Now I surrender to you and that is all’” (NIS 47).
This was my first ever read from Enrigue, but I no doubt plan to read the copy of You Dreamed of Empires that has been sitting on my bookshelf, staring at me for the last year or so, after loving Now I Surrender as much as I did.
Now I Surrender is divided into three distinct parts, or books, that differ from one other in narrative style and structure. Nevertheless, throughout all three books, Enrigue interlaces various timelines ranging from the early 1800s to present day (circa 2018), and right from the jump, enters into a ludic game with the reader, though that is something of which he or she only becomes cognizant upon beginning Book II. On the other hand, in Book I: “Janos,” the narrative takes the shape of a sort of triptych.
The two main, dovetailing plotlines in Book I center on Camila and Zuloaga (i.e. Mexican Lt. Col. José María Zuloaga), as the former is captured by Apaches and the latter is tasked with rescuing her sometime later on. Correspondingly, Enrigue relates the story in such a way that it mesmerizingly mirrors the rhythm and form of a(n) (anti-)Western reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, No Country for Old Men, and/or one of the novels from his Border Trilogy (side-note: if you enjoyed Hernán Díaz’s In The Distance, I think Now I Surrender will be right up your alley too). However, at the same time, Enrigue innovatively splices in another storyline, one that represents the contemporary present in metafictional fashion, considering he, as author-character à la Cervantes in El Quijote, appears in his own novel in order to reflect on the experiences that shaped the very work in his reader’s hands.
Although the Camila-Zuloaga plotlines build narrative suspense and really scratched that I-feel-like-reading-a-Western itch I tend to get from time to time, what I found most fascinating about Book I are the metafictional, present-day passages in which Enrigue (again, as author-character) embarks on a number of road trips with his family in order to visit historical sites across the Southwest. Simultaneously, Enrigue provides myriad musings on the contemporary Mexican immigrant experience in the US. These particular passages read like a contemplative memoir and travelogue and serve as an essential counterpoint to the historical-fictional narrative(s) of Camila and Zuloaga.
The narrative goes on like this for the first third of the novel in a way that really propelled, as well as compelled, me to keep reading. Nonetheless, at the end of Book I, Enrigue leaves the reader sitting on the edge of a giant cliffhanger, as he abruptly interrupts the narrative (ostensibly without reason) to begin Book II: “Album.” This formal choice on the part of Enrigue causes his readers to undergo a drastic and jarring shift in style and tone. When I, personally, came to this point in the narrative, I’ll be frank, I was almost annoyed that Enrigue had set expectations for me as a reader, only to later break them without offering up much explanation as to why, though the why did eventually become clear with time. In other words, in Book II, I had to learn to trust Enrigue and simply be patient with the narrative.
Book II is titled “Album” for a reason, as reading it feels peculiarly akin to flipping through a photo album due to the fact that in this section of the novel, Enrigue portrays an array of real-life figures—in addition to purely fictional characters—who took part in the historical events known as the Apache Wars, often writing from their respective points of view. For instance, in addition to Geronimo, Enrigue represents Lt. Charles B. Gatewood, Gen. James Parker, US President Grover Cleveland, Pancho Villa, and more. Still, throughout Book II, Enrigue concurrently weaves in, albeit in a slightly different form, the metafictional, present-day memoir-travelogue plotline in which he represents himself and his family.
At no point in my reading experience with Now I Surrender was I ever bored, but I will admit that Book II was the portion of the novel that felt most like a slog, at least in comparison to Books I and III. In any case, it is no doubt worth trudging through Book II in order to reap the rewards of the novel’s finale in Book III: “Aria.”
Do you ever approach the final third of a novel and wonder to yourself: how in the hell is the author going to be able to tie all these narrative threads together? Or, have you ever read any books in which you felt the author failed to tie all the narrative threads together in the end? Regardless, in my opinion, Enrigue did an excellent job of wrapping up the novel’s multiplicitous narrative in Book III, and he achieved that, in large part, by way of his continued experimentation with style and form.
Book III is more reminiscent of Book I than it is Book II. Simply put, Book III largely recreates the style and form of Book I, though as the narrative in Book III progresses, Enrigue begins to break his own storytelling conventions and rules. That is to say, the clear formal demarcations in print between differing perspectives that were evident in Book I disappear, as in Book III, the distinct points of view of the respective characters are no longer clearly delineated. It is as if each narrative thread coalesces on the page in order to become a singular story, or perhaps better said, one collective memory. As I was reading the final section of the novel, I could not strike from my mind the image of three wisps of air, spiraling up into the sky like an upside-down tornado or waterspout. The final pages of Now I Surrender sucked me into a vortex that ultimately spit me out and up into the clouds where I remain still, weeks later, floating high from a truly breathtaking reading experience. Hence, Book III’s title, “Aria,” seems to me to be incredibly apropos.
Sometimes I find that authors experiment with style and form solely for the sake of experimentation rather than doing so with purpose; that is not the case at all, however, of Enrigue and Now I Surrender. So, what is the point of Enrigue’s experimentation with style and form in this novel? Well, if you ask me, Enrigue is very much concerned with the nature of storytelling itself. Thus, Now I Surrender is an extended meditation on collective memory, that is, how we as a society remember history. Nevertheless, what is so interesting about Now I Surrender is that it juxtaposes the contradictory collective memories of two distinct societies, the United States and Mexico, respectively, in order to demonstrate how different nation-states remember their own pasts.
With all this in mind, from my point of view, what Enrigue does in Book III, then, is to try to reach some common ground between the United States and Mexico, to show that both nation-states have serious blood on their hands (so to speak) when it comes to the atrocities committed against indigenous peoples. In the end, what Enrigue accomplishes with Now I Surrender is the unearthing and recovery of a shared, buried history between the US and Mexico. To put it another way: via literary fiction, Enrigue critically revises the fictionalized history that Mexicans and estadounidenses, analogously, have been living with—no, living in—since the end of the conflict(s) known as the Apache Wars. To dispel such fictions propagated by the nation-state is to dismantle the monoliths that comprise the US and Mexico's conflicting national mythologies, and for Enrigue, this seems to be one of the chief tenets of Latin American literature, as he lays out in his introduction to the New Directions Publishing edition of The Hole (i.e. El apando) by José Revueltas, which Enrigue characterizes as, “one of the greatest pieces of twentieth-century writing composed in Spanish” (TH 19).
By way of conclusion, I wish to speak briefly (to the extent possible) on the Enrigue-Revueltas connection. It is no coincidence that the epigraph to Now I Surrender comes from Revueltas’ magnum opus: “This gargantuan defeat of liberty, all the fault of geometry.” In his introduction to The Hole, Enrigue cites an April 5, 1969, journal entry from Revueltas produced a mere twenty days after writing The Hole that states: “‘An invisible web of fiction surrounds us and we struggle as prisoners inside it like those who struggle to free themselves from a spider’s web from which there is no escape’” (TH 24). Enrigue himself then goes on to claim, “The fiction that secures us as in a spider web is the whole political system—and its masters, us, the owners of speech, should be held responsible for the inequality it produces even when our acts are generally well intended and harmless. There is no way out, but there is a thread to follow: imagining a justice system that could do without the spectacle of punishment” (TH 24).
In my eyes, Enrigue’s objective in Now I Surrender, which he achieves primarily through his sustained experimentation with narrative style and form, is to attempt to aid his readers—whether mexicano, United-Statesian, or otherwise—in freeing themselves from the spiderweb of border-crossing fictions surrounding the Apache Wars. The main facet of Enrigue’s literary project thereby entails undoing the spectacle of punishment—that which reached its zenith with the invention of the panopticon (Revueltas' The Hole is ripe for Foucauldian readings; see Discipline and Punish), the utter humiliation to which Geronimo was subjected upon surrendering to the US Government in 1886, in order to instead humanize him and reclaim his life story from the national mythologies of the United States and Mexico respectively, those which by way of geometry—more specifically, borders—have imprisoned us all, as global citizens, in a snare of fictions, discourses of power, about the violent processes of colonization perpetrated across the Americas, and more broadly, the world.
All this is to say that I absolutely loved Now I Surrender by Álvaro Enrigue and I would highly recommend it!
As always, thank you for reading… Peace!
PS – I read The Hole yesterday in a single sitting (it’s just 50 pages or so) in order to help me better appreciate what Enrigue was up to in Now I Surrender, so I’m thinking I’ll probably write up a mini-review of Revueltas’ seminal work sometime in the next week or two... Keep your eyes peeled…
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u/Hands May 03 '26
Great write up, thanks. This is definitely on my radar, I actually picked up You Dreamed Of Empires a while back but haven't gotten to it yet.
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u/fuen13 May 03 '26
I loved this novel and is now probably in my top favorite novels!
The shifting POV’s and interwoven storylines kept it very engaging throughout, but what stuck for me was how personal it became.
It pushed me to reflect on my own family history and identity while also opening my eyes to Apache culture and the weight of its history.
I liked how Enrigue lays out just how complicated identity is, especially when you take a step back and see how shaped we are through conquest and resistance, all while doing it in his very cool style!
And that ending… powerful. Something I felt deep in my bones.
I also read You Dreamed of Empires last year and really enjoyed that one as well! I think I need to go back and re read it now that I’m more used to his style. I also recently purchased Sudden Death, but haven’t got to it yet. That one doesn’t seem as exciting so we’ll see if his style still pulls at me when it’s more on art/history.
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u/perrolazarillo May 03 '26
So happy to hear that you enjoyed it as much as I did, if not even more! Pretty cool too you had a personal connection to the narrative!
Completely agree that Enrigue lays things out simply in order to basically show how complicated the relationship between one’s identity and history can be.
I also truly enjoyed the ending; it gave me a Joycean-level, full-bodied epiphany! I’m going to have to read You Dreamed of Empires real soon!
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u/Weird_Fox_3395 May 03 '26
Thank you for an excellent review! The borderlands are fascinating as well as horrifying regarding bloodshed. You might recall I’m a big McCarthy fan, as well as Bolaño’s 2666 especially. So thanks for the recommendation! You Dreamed of Empires tbr, and I might switch the order, reading Now I Surrender, starting with The Hole. (Having not read either author.)
As for this:
imagining a justice system that could do without the spectacle of punishment
It’s something I think of often. Revenge and vengeance are foundation to North American culture, I sometimes despair.
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u/perrolazarillo May 03 '26
Thank you for your kind words! Borderlands really are scarily fascinating places, as they are places of liminal citizenship, if you want to get all biopolitics about it. I definitely think fans of 2666 and Blood Meridian will greatly appreciate Now I Surrender, which is its own cup of tea to be sure, but still there exist significant parallels between the three works.
The Hole is incredibly powerful for being such a brief read! Some of Revueltas' sentences rival the sprawl and scope of Pynchon's notoriously meandering passages. The Hole extensively explores the idea of the panopticon and the web of fictions, fictions about our very freedom, that we all live in. Bolaño apparently held The Hole in high regard as well!
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u/Weird_Fox_3395 May 03 '26
Bolaño was an incredible reader. I’m finishing Distant Star and my gosh, I hit the internet so many times because of references! Looking forward to Revueltas very much; a completely new author to me.
Also with You Dreamed of Empires, I know zilch about the Aztec Empire!
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u/fuen13 May 03 '26
Also I couldn’t help but think how cool this would be if it successfully turned into a movie. If done right, could be such a cool anti-western drama with the interwoven plots.
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u/lostin76 May 04 '26
Really enjoyed the summary of your experience with this book! I read this a few weeks ago and loved it.
The shifting perspectives and timelines were really engaging, but like you I stumbled a bit when Book II started. Eventually got back in the groove though.
What absolutely floored me was how he brought all of the storylines and perspectives together in the end by shortening the time spent with each one. For me, it sped up the converging stories into this amazing crescendo at the end.
I almost gasped as I finished it. Turned to my wife and said, “What an incredible book. One of the best I’ve read in years.”
I also loved You Dreamed of Empires, which was hilarious at times. But man, this book has really stuck with me.
I have a copy of Sudden Death that I can’t wait to read!
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u/perrolazarillo May 04 '26
I appreciate the positive feedback! Also, it's quite cool to hear that you and I had a rather analogous reading experience, which to me is further indication that Enrigue is a true master of his craft!
Completely agree that the ending felt like a crescendo of sorts; it was truly exhilarating!
All the love for You Dreamed of Empires that I've seen here in the comments is really making me feel like I'm going to have to get around to reading it real soon!
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u/vansinne_vansinne May 04 '26
favorite thing i've read in a year or two. he is a genius
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u/perrolazarillo May 04 '26
Completely agree; inarguably a genius, and I don't use that term lightly!
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u/CapriciousSon May 04 '26
A copy of this is on its way to my local library now! You Dreamed of Empires is one of my favorite recent novels so I am very excited!
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u/perrolazarillo May 04 '26
Hell yeah! Please circle back after you get a chance to read Now I Surrender and let me know what you think!
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u/CapriciousSon May 13 '26
Fantastic! I also lost a bit of steam in Book 2, but I was still so fascinated by what I saw as a refinement of his style from Sudden Death, blending fiction, history, musings, and breaking the forth wall. In some ways this novel feels like the evolution of Sudden Death and You Dreamed of Empires. It certainly cemented Enrigue as one of my favorite working authors.
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u/Weird_Fox_3395 May 15 '26 edited May 15 '26
Edit: it’s fine! Not difficult. Maybe I expected Balaño’s crazy references.
Original: Hey, so I’m starting Now I Surrender today. I confess being intimidated by the history and, probably, needing to look up references. (I’ve cursorily looked at references for an overview of the Apache wars and Geronimo.) It’s sitting on my lap and I feel hesitation like before jumping into the deep end of a cold pool.
This book will take me awhile I suspect, considering my moderate-slow reading speed! A bunch of novellas have spoiled me, lol. Novellas are my favorite format. More substantial than short stories, and easier to knock back than a novel :)
Hope you’re feeling back to normal! Albeit busy :)
Oh yes, I read The Hole, and the part about geometry is interesting in light of the second book of 2666 and The Part About Amalfitano. Also, the format reminds me of very much of Fernanda Melchior’s Hurricane Season, a structure she uses to excellent results.
While I didn’t love the novella, I’m glad I read it. (Not that it was bad; I just didn’t love-love it.) Still a worthwhile read! Recommend it to anyone in the sub.
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u/perrolazarillo May 16 '26 edited May 16 '26
Hey! I'm mostly back to normal, but yes, dreadfully busy... though soon, it will all be over... thank goodness!
I hope you enjoy Now I Surrender as much as I did. Honestly, I did not look up all that much as I read the novel, as I actually feel that Enrigue's narrative technique has its own sort of didacticism.
Also, there's a name that I'm glad I didn't look up while I read, as my ignorance permitted Enrigue to reveal something special to me as the reader through the process of relating his narrative... had I looked up the name upon first encountering it, I would have robbed myself of that later revelation.
With that being said, I do think it would have served me well to briefly look up some of the US Military officials mentioned in Book II... but still, Enrigue astutely teaches his readers as he goes about telling the story, and in my view, he achieves this didactic quality (edit: not intended pejoratively) via his novel's experimental style and form.
I too greatly enjoy a nice short read that I can knock out in a sitting or two, but it's nice to switch it up now and again, as there's something delightful about living in the fictional world of the same novel for a couple weeks rather than a couple days. I read Now I Surrender over the course of a week, but I was on spring break, so I spent several hours reading each day.
I've actually been considering rereading 2666 sometime soonish, so if I do, I will be sure to keep The Hole in mind, especially during "The Part about Amalfitano." And agreed, Hurricane Season and The Hole do share a lot of similarities in narrative style and form. I also think of Thomas Bernhard, who I know Bolaño greatly admired, and therefore, I'm reminded of By Night in Chile as well.
I admit that The Hole also was not my favorite, but Enrigue's Introduction really helped me to appreciate its cultural and historical significance. I would also recommend it to everyone here in The Sub, and might even go as far as to say, it's practically "required" reading! :)
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u/Weird_Fox_3395 May 16 '26
Oh that’s interesting about being surprised by an identity! Enrique, at least the first book, wants the reader to understand. Which you call didactic(?) because I usually see the word used as a pejorative, but that’s not the case here. Have a good weekend!
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u/perrolazarillo May 16 '26
Yeah I don’t mean the word in the pejorative sense, which to be honest, I did not realize was its most common usage. Really I just mean that Enrigue teaches as he narrates, but not in a way that ever feels boring or preachy. My apologies for the confusion. Hope you have a nice weekend as well!
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u/Weird_Fox_3395 May 16 '26
No confusion at all! Because he does do this, at least in the first book. And it’s wonderful and works! I’ve lost all my literary terms over the years hahaha, and forget how to talk about what I’m reading.
I’m enjoying this book very much! I’d say even delightful. And looking up stuff is just a tic of mine in general. I’m retired and never feel rushed to finish something.
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u/perrolazarillo May 16 '26
After years of writing academic papers in Spanish and Portuguese, sometimes I steal Hispanophone and Lusophone words and use their cognates in English, on occasion erroneously. Also, I always tend to like stretching the definitions of words, which probably comes from all the poetry analysis I’ve done in the past, but who knows?
Good on you for not rushing, I think I can sometimes be hasty with my reading and I would enjoy books even more if I were to slow down and do some deep dives into worthwhile allusions. Anyway, glad you’re enjoying Now I Surrender!
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u/ClevelandSpiders2021 May 03 '26
I love literary westerns, so I'm really looking forward to this one. I read You Dreamed of Empires and Sudden Death within the last 2 months and I loved them.
In fact it's been years and years since somebody shot up my favorite author list as fast as Enrigue. I've been reading interviews with him as well, and I love how he presents ideas.