The three narratives in Now I Surrender never quite cohere ... y the end, with the Geronimo material, you sense that Enrigue is filibustering, leaning too heavily on his research, as he introduces character after character and explores every wrinkle of the negotiations over Geronimo’s fate ... Here’s one reason I love reading Enrigue anyway. The tough guys in his fiction often have effeminate sides (some of their boots have improbable heels) and they’re always taking miniature pratfalls ... 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.
The author’s approach to this cataclysmic history is to shred it, reassemble it, and reframe it, offering the satisfactions of Westerns, historical epics, and metafiction even as he overturns all three traditions. Enrigue has a penchant for shooting the facts of history through a prism of the absurd ... The resulting novel about this vanished country, Apachería, is slightly unclassifiable; I’d start by describing it as a darkly comic, revisionist Western for the age of autofiction. But there’s more to it than gleeful perversions of genre ... Enrigue is an erudite, charismatic raconteur...and his novel distills a byzantine swirl of historical events through the lives of a handful of very colorful characters. Just as compelling are the ways that he freshly revises the Western ... With so many stories rolled into more than 450 pages, the novel does slow down in parts ... As in his other novels, however, loose ends in many cases get tied up later on, and a seemingly chaotic tangle of yarns suddenly becomes cohesive.
A pendant work of revisionism that centers on Geronimo’s defiance and defeat, is a longer, more complicated novel ... The book is by turns brilliant, provocative, digressive and dull—abounding in talent but confusingly at odds with itself ... Despite a concluding chapter that struggles to make these storylines converge, Now I Surrender remains frustratingly splintered ... Stubbornly fights against the kind of engagement its author is preternaturally good at arousing. This distinguishes it unfavorably from the traditional western, which, however reductive or politically wrongheaded, has always known how to keep an audience interested.
Defiantly challenging, occasionally overblown, and, at times, magical ... Engrossing, if brutal ... Enrigue's novel, which takes its title from Geronimo's eloquent words, loses some vitality when it focuses on the story of his surrender and afterlife as a prisoner of war and a curiosity ... Recounting the story of Geronimo's fall felt more a writerly duty, than a desire ... There's room for everyone in this epic of conquest and eradication.
By turns an impassioned anti-imperialist lament, a gripping alt-western, a meditation on human freedom, an autofictional travelogue and, on occasion, the reading equivalent of a slow-moving trudge across an inhospitable landscape ... 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.
Sprawling ... Where US authors seeking to revise the myths of the West have often dialed up the bloodshed (think Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian), Enrigue’s preferred twist is a wry strain of humor ... The tone hovers between impish and elegiac ... Enrigue’s deft handling of his densely researched material shines here, as do his cheeky departures from the historical record ... Enrigue limits himself to inhabiting the perspectives of his Mexican and American characters; the Apache themselves are seen only from the outside.
Despite occasional passages that slow the narrative, 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. Now I Surrender is not light reading, but it’s a treat for patient readers who love historical fiction.
Turns conventional wisdom about the borderlands on its head ... I would wager that the historical events narrated in Now I Surrender will be unfamiliar to nearly all of the book’s readers ... Yet if the West is indeed the unconscious of the United States, this history is already buried within us. Every American—in the continental sense of the word—needs to learn this past.
As with Enrigue’s earlier books, he’s determined to upset narrative convention, and Wimmer, his longtime translator, handles his veering skillfully ... A curious but effective treatment of an underappreciated effort to resist imperialism.
