On an overcast afternoon the week before Thanksgiving, the Mexican writer Álvaro Enrigue was sitting on a bench in Central Park. Joggers dressed in Dri-Fit toddled by in pairs, like ducks out for a swim. Enrigue, who lives in Harlem, was wearing the uniform of a different vocation: black turtleneck sweater, gray herringbone trousers, statement frames. Literary novelist, genus Borgesian. Gesturing in the direction of the Harlem Meer, where the city’s newest public pool was closed for the season, the 56-year-old pinpointed one of those enigmas of the past he has made a career of exploring. “Go to the pool here in summer,” he says, breaking into a mischievous grin. “You will see these American kids shouting ‘Geronimo!’ They don’t shout ‘Jefferson!’ Or ‘Miguel Hidalgo!’ ”
The image—a kid, mid-cannonball, rifling through her mental Rolodex past the forefathers of the U.S. and Mexico and selecting, a half-second before splashdown, the Apache who waged an impossible war against those nations—encapsulates Enrigue’s gleefully profane approach to history. Of his six novels, Sudden Death (2016) was the first to be published in English and recounts a 16th-century tennis match between the Italian painter Caravaggio and the Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo. The players are morbidly hungover, the ball is made of hair from Anne Boleyn’s severed head, and the action is paused for email exchanges between the author and his editor. You Dreamed of Empires (2024) riffs on Borges’s “The Secret Miracle” to reimagine the first meeting between conquistador Hernán Cortés and Aztec emperor Moctezuma as a psychedelic farce. At the climactic moment, Moctezuma, stoned on peyote in the inner sanctum of a Tenochtitlan temple, dances to T. Rex’s “Monolith.”
Both novels are filled with the kinds of obscure details—the scent of a Xipe priest caked in sacrificial blood; the spin of a ball off the gallery roof of a Renaissance-era tennis court—that only someone with an “irrational” (Enrigue’s word) devotion to reading and thinking about the past would know enough to grasp. Both are also artfully translated from Spanish by Natasha Wimmer, who renders the anarchic fizz of a sentence like this one, about Anne Boleyn’s exit: “Vertebrae, cartilage, the spongy tissue of trachea and pharynx: the sound of their parting was like the pop of a cork liberated from a bottle of wine.”
“He really can’t contain himself as a writer,” Wimmer says. “That goes for the editorial process, too. His marginal notes are hilarious. I’m always telling him, We should make a book of his little elucidations to me.”
Out next from the duo is Now I Surrender, an epic of the Apache Wars that Riverhead will release in March. The title comes from Geronimo’s 1886 statement of surrender to U.S. Army general George Crook (“Once I moved like the wind. Now I surrender to you and that is all”), and the story chronicles, among other threads, the campaign to bring the war shaman to heel; the kidnapping, 50 years earlier, of a Mexican woman by Apaches; and a 2016 road trip taken by the author and his family to Apachería, the tribe’s ancestral homeland where Arizona, New Mexico, and the Mexican states of Sonora and Chihuahua meet.
All three novels, Enrigue says, “speak exactly about the same thing with the same capital of political rage.” The “thing” in question is the birth of modernity, the reordering of the world along lines of progress, commerce, and the exploitation of Indigenous civilizations by European ones. The political rage is that of a Mexican living in New York in an era of border walls, “bad hombres,” and family separation. Now I Surrender, which was published in Spanish in 2018, is twice the length of the other two books and the most anguished of the three. No wonder: it was written, Enrigue says, “in response to the worst vulgarity in the world: the first election of Donald Trump.”
It’s also, in many ways, the most personal. The breaking of the fourth wall in Sudden Death and You Dreamed of Empires is jolting, like a door blown open by a gust of wind. The family road trip thread in Now I Surrender is more like the jet stream: a continuous current
around which the novel organizes itself. It was inspired by trips to southern Arizona that Enrigue took with his then-wife, Mexican American writer Valeria Luiselli; their daughter; and his two sons. Readers of Luiselli’s acclaimed 2019 novel Lost Children Archive, which depicts, in part, the unraveling of a marriage during a family road trip to Apachería, will recognize the resonances.
The youngest of four, Enrigue grew up in Mexico City, surrounded by cousins. “There was always an enormous meal on Sunday,” he says, adding that in order to win the conversation, “you had to make everybody laugh, to tell a very good story.” The Accursed Kings, a series of novels by Maurice Druon about the 14th-century French monarchy, was an early influence, mainly because his father said he was too young for all the sex and violence the books portrayed. “When everybody was asleep,” Enrigue recalls, “I would go downstairs and read the first tome, The Iron King. It drove me crazy.” Later came Stendhal’s The Red and the Black and the giants of the Latin American Boom: Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Octavio Paz.
Enrigue’s debut novel, La muerte de un instalador (Death of an Installation Artist), was written during the Mexican peso crisis of the 1990s, which decimated the country’s publishing industry, leaving few opportunities for new writers. A newspaper announcement that Joaquín Mortiz, the renowned imprint, would be awarding a first novel prize gave him a deadline and hopes of winning the money to cover costs related to the birth of his first child. He submitted the manuscript at the last minute and won. (An editor friend later teased him that he won because it was at the top of the pile.)
Enrigue moved to the U.S. in 1998, enrolling in the PhD program in Latin American literature at the University of Maryland, College Park. Initially he wanted, “as everyone does,” to specialize in Borges. “But very soon I discovered that all the cool stuff was in the 16th and 17th centuries,” he says. In between classes, he wrote El cementerio de sillas (The Cemetery of Chairs), the first of his novels to deal with the past—in particular a mythical link between the ancient Garamantes of North Africa and pre-Columbian America. It might be “the novel with the least amount of readers ever published,” Enrigue jokes, but it taught him how to be the writer he is now.
That kind of writer is, first and foremost, a reader. Drawn to a subject, he reads about it for years, filling page after page with notes handwritten in different colors according to which project they belong to. “My notebooks are full of incredibly bad prospects,” he says, opening one to a page of closely scribbled Spanish text in blocks of red, blue, and black. “And then there is a moment in which something awakes and I say, I’m going to work on this.”
What Enrigue found in the Apache Wars was a story of resistance. “We will not fucking bend,” he says, channeling Geronimo, Cochise, and other Apache leaders who, given no choice but to become part of the U.S. or Mexico, opted to fight until the end. “I found it very moving and very illustrative,” he adds. “You can resist.”
The elm trees on Central Park West were a brilliant shade of yellow, signing off for the season in glorious fashion. Apachería seemed far away, an impossible place for an impossible people. “Imagine the little boy from la colonia Nápoles giving an interview,” Enrigue says, waving his hand toward a city that seemed, for a moment, to be at his feet. “If you take a picture, we look like we are in a movie.” And then, like a kid tempted by a placid pool, he jumped. “Of course, in the picture will not be the rent, the commute, the hell of living in New York City,” he says, laughing. “I love it.”
