Praise for Now I Surrender
“Offer[s] the satisfactions of Westerns, historical epics, and metafiction even as [Enrigue] overturns all three traditions.” –The Atlantic
“This gifted Mexican writer … delivers novels that are steeped in history and have a hallucinatory sense of pageantry. Reading him, you sense you are watching the passing of a long, antic, blood-flecked cortège, or a trans-hemispheric second-line parade, one threaded with the vestiges of old mythologies. … You can sense a bit of Bolaño in Enrigue: the postmodern playfulness, the cosmopolitanism, the historical conscience… Here’s one reason I love reading Enrigue…. The tough guys in his fiction often have effeminate sides (some of their boots have improbable heels) and they’re always taking miniature pratfalls. They sniff and wipe their earwax on their trousers; they have bits of scrambled egg stuck in their mustachios. If Enrigue were remaking High Noon, Gary Cooper would have pubic lice. This author has a natural appetite for subversion. Enrigue’s novels are not the places to come if you are nostalgic for notional simplicities of the American past. He’s one of the best we have, and he’s not done pushing against conventions.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times
“By turns an impassioned anti-imperialist lament, a gripping alt-western, a meditation on human freedom, an autofictional travelogue.… As the novel reaches its conclusion, the author slowly binds the narrative threads tighter and tighter, collapsing the historical distance and revealing the pulsating truth at the heart of his book. For all that it might be the incarcerated Apaches who are at the sharp end of this tragedy, the forces that apparently necessitated their demise—the notion of manifest destiny, the hegemony of the nation state, the relentless march of modernity—have, Álvaro Enrigue suggests, denied us all the chance of achieving the highest forms of human flourishing.”—Times Literary Supplement
“Enrigue has a long career of writing brilliant and gripping literary accounts of Mexico’s history with a daring flair. His work is a moving and complex love letter to Mexico, mesmerizing anyone who has ever been awestruck by the country… It’s a slice of bloody American history with a timely edge.”—Los Angeles Times
“A major work of historical reclamation. . . an eloquent rejoinder to the mythos that made two countries while erasing the lives of their original inhabitants.”—Publishers Weekly, STARRED review
“A thought-provoking meditation on defiance, defeat, and assimilation.”—Booklist
“As with Enrigue’s earlier books, he’s determined to upset narrative convention, and Wimmer, his longtime translator, handles his veering skillfully. Enrigue’s approach isn’t so much to lament the end of Apachería so much as to admire the steeliness of a tribe that survived centuries-long attempts to subdue it. A curious but effective treatment of an underappreciated effort to resist imperialism.”—Kirkus
“It’s refreshing to read the work of an author unafraid to challenge readers with an adventure that is as brainy as it is fun… it’s a treat for patient readers who love historical fiction.”—Book Page
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