Álvaro Enrigue is the author of a book I’ve touted as one of the best historical fiction novels in translation, and Book Riot Editor Erica Ezeifedi picked as an excellent book club read. His new novel, Now I Surrender, is clearly shaping up to be just as impactful. In her review of Enrigue’s new book, Atlantic writer Carolina A. Miranda describes it as “shooting the facts of history through the prism of the absurd.” That absurdist, revisionist take on history is something I loved about his novel, You Dreamed of Empires, which twists the story of the Spanish Conquistadors’ invasion of Tenochtitlan on its head. Now I Surrender seems to be doing much the same with the story of Geronimo and the 19th-century Apache Wars.
Writing Family History To Cope With Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric
As the rhetoric around immigration and the US-Mexico border has grown increasingly malicious throughout Trump’s presidencies, one author looked to her own family’s history to explore a more intimate perspective. In conversation with Lit Hub, Cristina Rivera Garza, author of Autobiography of Cotton, described her need to write this book as “a raw desire to honor the lives of the people that had made space for me in this country.”
Garza views genre not as a static form, but as “porous living entities that mutate and challenge us at will.” Parsing the line between memoir and history in her book isn’t a terribly meaningful exercise because “fiction is the amalgam…less a blend and more a sustained collision.”
Reading Garza’s interview has definitely motivated me to check out more of her work. One quote, in particular, is going to stay with me: “We turn to the past when the present is unbearable.” Given the times, I can’t help but think about all that means as both a writer and as a reader of historical fiction.
Gonzalo Celorio Wins Spain’s Cervantes Prize
Mexican writer Gonzalo Celorio, author of And Let the Earth Tremble at Its Centers and numerous other novels, was named the most recent winner of the Cervantes Prize, “the most important award in Hispanic literature” (according to the Spanish Minister of Culture). The jury recognized Celorio for the “exceptional literary work and intellectual labor with which he has profoundly and consistently contributed to the enrichment of the Spanish language and Hispanic culture.”
The Cervantes Prize is typically announced late in the year and presented in April, around the 23rd, the day of Miguel de Cervantes’ death, at the University of Alcalá de Henares in Madrid, where Cervantes was born.
Want to explore more Mexican fiction and fiction in translation? Here are some great recommendations:
Historical Fiction Set in Mexico