u/perrolazarillo

Time of the Flies - Claudia Piñeiro. What happens when a woman gets out of prison after a long sentence and just wants to go start herself a new life by way of a pest extermination business? Well, other people tend to take notice, especially when you were in for a high-profile murder. What unfolds is amazing, experimental in parts, and full of twists and turns right up until yet another explosive ending from Claudia Piñeiro.

I see Elena Knows recommended a lot (though maybe not itself a weird girl book), but I don’t see this one by the same author often, and it definitely fits the weird girl brief. And it made me wonder what other amazing weird girl fiction slips through the cracks for English-speaking readers. So what else is out there?

Here are my other contributions:

- Any books written by Mariana Enriquez
- The Unworthy by Augustina Bazterrica (I’ll admit this one is a bit low-hanging fruit).
- On Earth as it is Beneath by Ana Paula Maia. This book, full disclosure, has no female characters. But I include it because, besides being written by a woman, I consider it to be a sort antithesis to I Who Have Never Known Men that so-hot-it’s-cold’s itself into being about a lot of the same themes (this probably makes no sense I had a gummy lol)

Is there any news related to Latin American literature that you wish to share with the subreddit?

Are you aware of any new book releases in the field of Latin American literature? Is there a literary event that you’d like to promote? Do you have any other pertinent information worth sharing here?

Thanks in advance!

*****

The big release on my radar comes from our friends at Charco Press, who will be publishing Claudia Piñeiro's latest release in English, Cathedrals, sometime later in the month of May. See the synopsis straight from Charco's website below:

"Lia fled her home after a brutal crime decades ago, but family, and the truth, will never let you go. Thirty years ago, in an empty plot of a quiet neighbourhood, a teenage girl's body was found quartered and burned. The investigation ended with no arrests and her family – middle class, educated, Catholic – quietly disintegrated. Three decades later, the hidden truth comes to light thanks to the father's enduring love for the victim. That truth will reveal the raw realities lurking behind appearances, the cruelty of those who prioritize obedience and religious fanaticism, the complicity of the fearful and the indifferent, and the loneliness and desperation of those who seek to follow their own path, ignoring the dictates of their elders. Just as she did with Elena Knows and A Little Luck , Claudia Piñeiro delves into family ties, social prejudice, and the ideologies and institutions that affect our inner worlds to deliver a brave, moving novel that strikes at the heart of these private dramas."

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…

I recently spotted this book at one of my local thrift shops (no, I didn’t buy it) and was reminded of the truly global nature of Gabriel García Márquez’s reach.

I’ve never read Love in the Time of Cholera, but I know it’s one of Gabo’s more popular publications in English.

Have you read it? If so, what did you think? How does it stack up against One Hundred Years of Solitude? Thanks in advance for your thoughts!

Anyway, here’s to more translations of Latin American literature in the future… Cheers!

PS — when I put the Vietnamese title into Google Translate, here’s what it spits out: “Love to the point of diarrhea,” which to me is a hilarious yet revealing reminder that translation is an imperfect but vital art form!

My area of "expertise" is no doubt Spanish-language literatures, and in particular, Latin American literature. However, I'm always looking to broaden my horizons.

Accordingly, I'm wondering if anyone here might be willing to make me some nyrb recommendations based on the current state of my rather humble collection.

I've thought about picking up a copy of Luis Martín-Santos' Time of Silence, Camilo José Cela's The Hive, and The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes, but I've actually already read each of them in Spanish, so I haven't quite felt the need to add them to my collection... at least not yet... With that being said, if you haven't read these three Peninsular Spanish works, I think they're all great and would definitely recommend them!

On the other hand, I have not read Miaow by Benito Pérez-Galdós nor Tyrant Banderas by Ramón del Valle-Inclán. Has anyone here read either? If so, would you recommend them?

I believe I own most of the Latin American titles in the nyrb classics series, besides Augusto Monterroso's The Rest Is Silence, which I will certainly have to grab a copy of sooner or later... Has anyone here read The Rest is Silence? If so, thoughts?

Many of my nyrb titles are still TBR (I'm a bit of a collector and must admit that I went wild during some of those online sales last year), however, of the Latin American works I've read so far, I would definitely recommend these three novels from Argentina to all: Zama by Antonio Di Benedetto, The Seven Madmen by Roberto Arlt, and The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares.

Similarly, I would also recommend Gabriel García Márquez's book of reportage, Clandestine in Chile (Colombia), and Julio Ramón Ribeyro's collection of short fiction, The Word of the Speechless (Peru).

When I'm not reading books from the Hispanophone and Lusophone worlds, I'm usually reading twentieth and twenty-first-century ltierature from the United States. I have a few American nyrb classics in my collection, but I'm wondering if anyone might be able to suggest me some sleeper titles from the US that just might be up my alley.

Finally, modern European literature (i.e. outside the Iberian Peninsula) is something of a blind spot for me and also the area in which I am most looking to expand my collection. I've considered looking further into Stefan Zweig's work and also checking out Dino Buzzati's stuff, but haven't yet made that happen. Who else might you suggest?

Thank you in advance for any and all recommendations!

(Oh and by the way, join us over in r/latamlit if it happens to strike your fancy!)

Peace!