In 1836, Apaches raided a remote ranch near Janos, a tiny town on the northern fringes of the state of Chihuahua, in the newly independent republic of Mexico. The Natives absconded with some cattle, as well as with a young widow named Camila. Setting off in pursuit was José María Zuloaga, a taciturn lieutenant colonel in the Mexican army supported by a band of irregulars. Among them: a self-possessed teenager who served as an aide-de-camp, a pair of Yaqui brothers whose permanent address was the town jail, and a sharp-shooting nun named Elvira, who was actually a singer of zarzuelas dressed up in a habit.This is not a history but a delirious, pivotal set piece in Álvaro Enrigue’s novel Now I Surrender, which was published in Spanish in 2018 and is finally available in English this week. Camila’s kidnapping will tie into the true story of Geronimo, the famed Apache warrior and medicine man. Enrigue’s novel is inspired by the long-running Apache Wars of the 19th century, a series of brutal skirmishes between various Apache bands and the armies of the United States and Mexico. The trouble began in 1861, after Apaches kidnapped a boy from a ranch in Arizona, and it didn’t end until 1886, when Geronimo surrendered to the U.S. Army. Now I Surrender takes its title from the indelible words he uttered on that occasion: “Once I moved about like the wind. Now I surrender to you and that is all.” This is a sentence, writes Enrigue, “so broken and sad that there’s no way we can forgive ourselves for it.”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. His 2013 novel, Sudden Death, about the forces that shaped Renaissance-era Europe, revolves around a fictional tennis match between the Italian painter Caravaggio and the Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo, who face off with a ball fabricated from Anne Boleyn’s hair. You Dreamed of Empires, published in 2022, imagines the encounter between the Aztec leader Moctezuma and the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés as a hallucinatory dream induced by mushrooms. In one startlingly funny scene, Moctezuma has a vision of Enrigue writing the novel.For his story about the Apaches, a group that resisted colonization from the earliest days of the Spanish empire, Enrigue weaves in the tale of the novel’s creation more directly:The idea is to write a book about a country that still exists but was erased from the maps. A country that worked just as well or badly as any other country, and that was taken away from us like cassette tapes or incandescent light bulbs. Where Sonora, Chihuahua, and New Mexico meet today was an Atlantis, an in-between country. And straddling it were the Mexicans and the gringos, like two children, eyes shut, their backs to each other, while the Apaches scuttled back and forth between their legs, not sure where to go with strangers bubbling up everywhere, filling their lands.[Read: A new history of the Western hemisphere]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 examining a rupture, a moment when the colonial map was reorganized into “Mexico” and “the United States,” amorphous concepts that were being whittled into definition through a combination of land grabs, crass politicking, acts of war, and promises made and broken. By bringing to life the individuals caught up in these events, Enrigue helps us understand the choices that history is always forcing upon us—even now.Now I Surrender hopscotches among three principal, intertwined stories. The first is the absorbing tale of Camila’s abduction, an event that predates the Apache Wars by several decades. This storyline gives contour to the parched territories of Apachería before they were overtaken by ranches, railroads, and the armies of two nations, and it is the part that most evokes a traditional Western, as Zuloaga and his ragged band confront unforgiving violence both natural and human. The second braid is rooted in the trappings of historical fiction, tracing the political and military tactics (all the way to the White House) that finally led Geronimo, who for decades had eluded capture with practically supernatural skill, to surrender his freedom to the United States. Finally, layered over these two is a fictionalized account of a road trip that Enrigue made with his family to Apache historical sites, including Geronimo’s grave in Lawton, Oklahoma. (This same journey was also fictionalized by Valeria Luiselli, Enrigue’s ex-wife, in her 2019 novel about migrants, Lost Children Archive.)Enrigue is an erudite, charismatic raconteur—the sort who will tell you the most abject story with a wink—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, a genre that’s already been well turned over. Now I Surrender is set in roughly the same time and place as Cormac McCarthy’s 1985 novel, Blood Meridian. In fact, McCarthy’s scalp hunters dine with Zuloaga (a real historical figure) and, at one point, ride into Janos. Blood Meridian throws out the Western trope of good versus evil in favor of a nihilist view of a world consumed by violence. But even as McCarthy helped remake the form, he also adhered to some of its conventions. The Natives in his book are largely presented as plot devices, not flesh-and-blood individuals.Enrigue offers a more nuanced portrait of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, scrapping the binary of cowboy and Indian while also eschewing pat depictions of victimized Natives. His Apachería holds a complex society inhabited by criollos, mestizos, and people of several Indigenous ethnicities, some of whom have acculturated to European ways (indio de razón, or “Indian of reason,” in the lingo of the era). Zuloaga’s smart-mouthed troop functions as a lively microcosm of this world. The lieutenant colonel is a powerful criollo. His steely aide-de-camp, Mauricio Corredor (also based on a historical figure), is of Rarámuri heritage but has assimilated into Mexican culture. The rambunctious Yaqui brothers, Guadalupe and Victoria—named for the Mexican independence leader Guadalupe Victoria—aren’t keen to be called Mexican, but they consider the Apaches to be an ancestral enemy. The group reflects a place where boundaries, identities, and allegiances are always in flux. Today, the southern U.S. border is depicted by right-wing figures as a hard line between us and them, two groups with irreconcilable interests. In fact, it is—and has always been—a polyglot meeting point.[Read: The death of the pioneer myth]The author gives his version of the Western a distinctly Mexican cast. A subplot involving the burial of an itinerant musician bears echoes of the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo’s influential 1955 novel, Pedro Páramo, which depicts a world where the living and the dead are in constant communion. Enrigue also makes a convincing case that the story of Geronimo—its glory and its shame—does not belong to the United States alone. In the 140 years since his capture, the Apache leader has been transformed into a kitschy, all-American icon, his weary visage appearing on cheap Etsy merch bearing slogans such as Never Quit. Even the military that imprisoned him has appropriated his name: During World War II, U.S. paratroopers cried “Geronimo!” as they leaped from their planes, and today, the U.S. Army’s 1st Battalion, 509th Infantry Regiment is nicknamed for the Apache leader.Yet Geronimo was never “American.” He was given the name Goyahkla (“one who yawns”), born to the Bedonkohe band of Chiricahua Apaches in 1829 in a part of Mexico that only later became U.S. territory. He was therefore technically a Mexican citizen—one who spoke not a lick of English, only Spanish and his native Athabaskan. Still, he would have never identified as Mexican. And he developed an intense hatred for Mexico after many members of his family were brutally murdered by a Sonoran militia in 1851. (Whenever he came near his father’s grave or “saw anything to remind me of former happy days,” he said years later, “my heart would ache for revenge upon Mexico.”) His surrender to the U.S. Army rather than to the Mexicans—a gripping sequence in the novel—was an attempt to keep what remained of his people together. Perhaps surprising, the U.S. presented the less brutal alternative. What Mexicans offered Geronimo, Enrigue writes, “was a fitting death for their warriors and assimilation for their children.” What the Americans had in store were years of incarceration and “a life of humiliation, but one in which their difference would be recognized.”English can never entirely capture the musical cadences of Enrigue’s Mexican Spanish, but Natasha Wimmer’s artful translation channels the author’s wry, conversational tone. Colloquial Mexican expressions such as hijos de la chingada (roughly, “sons of bitches”) are left in the original Spanish, and the author’s observations retain their poetry. The Apaches, along with the Mexican revolutionaries who followed them, are described as “people from the end of one world and the beginning of another.”With so many stories rolled into more than 450 pages, the novel does slow down in parts. Enrigue’s reflections on the history of the Apaches and the borderlands are insightful, but the tensions he describes within his own family as they travel across the Southwest feel extraneous to the epic tale surrounding them. 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.What ultimately binds together the disparate elements of Now I Surrender is a sense of tenacity and defiance. Geronimo’s last words, spoken to his nephew, were “I should have never surrendered. I should have fought until I was the last man alive.” Recently, Enrigue told an interviewer that he wrote this book “in response to the worst vulgarity in the world: the first election of Donald Trump.” A willingness to face very long odds feels resonant in a time of great instability, a moment when old empires are crumbling and new ones are being born. In this light, Geronimo’s life and death seem intended to send a message: Continue the fight until the end.*Sources: Library of Congress; Catherine McQueen / Getty; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Bequest of Carolann Smurthwaite in memory of her mother, Caroline Atherton Connell Smurthwaite