Now I Surrender
A visionary Western from the author of You Dreamed of Empires
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- € 14,99
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A woman’s desperate flight from an Apache raid unfolds into a sweeping tale of the Mexico–US border wars.
Now I Surrender is the epic, darkly funny and action-packed story of the legendary Apache warrior Geronimo and how the American West was 'won'.
'Álvaro Enrigue one of the best we have, and he’s not done pushing against conventions' NEW YORK TIMES
'An impassioned anti-imperialist lament, a gripping alt-western' TLS
In the contested borderlands between Mexico and the United States, a Mexican woman flees into the desert after a devastating raid on her dead husband’s ranch. Meanwhile, a lieutenant colonel of the fledgling Republic, sent in pursuit of cattle rustlers, will soon discover he’s on the trail of a more dramatic abduction.
Decades later, with political ambitions on the line, the American and Mexican militaries try to manoeuvre Geronimo, the most legendary of Apache warriors, into surrender. And in our own day, a family travels through the region in search of a truer version of the past.
Now I Surrender is Álvaro Enrigue’s most expansive and impassioned novel yet. Part epic, part alt-Western, it weaves past and present, myth and history, into a searing elegy for a way of life that was an incarnation of true liberty – that still sparks in us the thrill of almost unimaginable freedom.
Translated by Natasha Wimmer
'Enrigue is an erudite, charismatic raconteur' THE ATLANTIC
'A moving and complex love letter to Mexico... a slice of bloody American history with a timely edge' LOS ANGELES TIMES
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This three-part saga of the Apache Wars and the long shadow of imperialism constitutes a major work of historical reclamation from Enrigue (You Dreamed of Empires). It begins in 1836 in border hamlet Janos, where widow Camila Ezguerra is kidnapped from her ranch. On their trail is Lt. Col. José María Zuloaga, who's made a name for himself killing Apaches for the "fledgling republic of Mexico," along with a motley crew of conscripts. Enrigue alternates from their expedition to the 1886 surrender of Geronimo and its aftermath, with chapters from historical figures like President Grover Cleveland, frustrated that Geronimo wasn't caught before ("Our army is the biggest in the world," he tells his secretary of war) and Geronimo's revolutionary heir, Pancho Villa, who, in 1916, describes how he learned battlefield strategies from the elder's spirit. Threaded throughout is the author's record of a road trip he takes with his family in present-day America, stopping at such landmarks as Geronimo's tomb in Oklahoma, and hoping along the way to rediscover the history behind the genocide of the Americas. "Westerns," Enrigue writes in this urgent and painstakingly researched narrative, "are the fairy tales gringos tell themselves to assure the triumph of bureaucratic reason over the excesses of individual will." It's an eloquent rejoinder to the mythos that made two countries while erasing the lives of their original inhabitants.
