Some novelists build fantastical dream worlds; others aim to capture reality in all its complexity. Among my favorite authors are those who try to do both at the same time. That's one reason I was intrigued by Carolina A. Miranda's essay in The Atlantic this week about Now I Surrender, the latest novel by the Mexican writer Alvaro Enrigue to be translated into English. The book 'distills a byzantine swirl of historical events through the lives of a handful of very colorful characters,' Miranda writes, intertwining several real and invented incidents with major moments in the Apache Wars, a series of skirmishes involving Native Americans, the U.S., and Mexico across the Southwest borderlands. Enrigue's 'penchant for shooting the facts of history through the prism of the absurd,' as Miranda puts it, makes him singular'but it also puts him firmly in a long literary tradition. Enrigue's approach serves his subject well because the Apache Wars are so often oversimplified. American...
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