Pedro Páramo

In this 1955 Mexican novella, a young man, Juan Preciado, promises his dying mother that he will find his father, the Pedro Páramo of the title, and claim his birthright. Juan has no independent memories of his father. His mother fled her abusive and loveless marriage shortly after Juan's birth and raised him by herself in a city far away from his father's ranch. After burying his mother, Juan sets off for Comalá where his father's ranch is located. When he reaches his destination, he finds an eerie, nightmarish town, inhabited entirely by ghosts. Comalá is a veritable graveyard where the dead relive their intolerable memories. All of those memories revolve around Pedro Páramo, the corrupt local boss, who turned Comalá into a hell on earth. Juan Rulfo's writing is surreal and dreamlike. This novel reads as if the main character is experiencing a nightmare. The narrative contains many abrupt shifts in time and frame of reference. These rapid shifts are disorienting, and greatly enhance the novel's disturbing effect. There is one memorable passage, where Juan is wandering the deserted streets and houses of Comalá, when suddenly the whole town fills up with water and Juan experiences the sensations of drowning. I could swear that passage is right out of one of my own nightmares. This book is far more than a ghost story. Like Toni Morrison's Beloved, Pedro Páramo is a social allegory in the form of a ghost story. The novel is filled with symbols and double-meanings. For example, Páramo means wasteland in Spanish (in fact, the Mexican edition of T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland is titled El Páramo). Juan Preciado is on a quest for his legacy. Instead, he finds a hellish wasteland, populated by ghosts. The novel is a social allegory of mid-twentieth century Mexico. From 1910 through the 1940s, Mexican society endured civil unrest, a revolutionary war, the anti-clerical purges of the Porfirio Diaz dictatorship and increased urbanization. An urban Mexican,seeking his roots, finds a bleak legacy of war, rampant poverty, destroyed haciendas and disbanded monasteries. Author Juan Rulfo was born to an upper class Mexican family. By the end of the Mexican Revolution, Rulfo's parents were dead and Rulfo himself was in an orphanage. Rulfo experienced firsthand the losses symbolically portrayed in his only novel, Pedro Páramo. Although this short novel is difficult to follow, it contains some of the most surreal and imaginative writing I've ever read. Margaret Sayers Peden's English translation keeps all of the beauty, imagery, symbolism and wordplay intact. The book is both remarkably beautiful and remarkably disturbing. I recommend reading it through once and then skimming through it a second time in order to put it into context and perspective. This novel is particularly worthwhile for readers with a Spanish language background and an interest in Latin America.

Pedro Paramo follows Juan Preciado's return to Comala to find his estranged father and as his mother instructs "make him pay, son, for all those years he put us out of his mind." It is late August when Juan arrives in Comala, a town so hot and dry, popular myth has it that "when people die and go to hell, they return for a blanket." Juan is greeted by Eduviges Dyada, an old friend of his mother's, and quickly learns that Pedro Páramo is long dead. But the conversation takes an odd turn, as Eduviges tells Juan that his mother had told her just that day to expect him. When told his mother is dead, Eduviges merely shrugs and responds, "So that was why her voice was so weak." As Juan remains in Comala, trying to learn about his father (and indeed something of his heritage), he gradually discovers that all the inhabitants he meets in this abandoned town are themselves ghosts -- each desperate to tell their stories. The novel breaks into shorter, non sequential fragments -- moving backward and forward in time even as it slowly weaves together the different narrative threads of the town's inhabitants. And the stories are powerful -- full of violence, lust, corruption, and tragedy. Juan seems to gradually fade among these powerful ghosts, and there comes a terrifying moment when one fears that he may have merged with the dead. He wakes to discover he is sharing a grave with another woman, listening to the muttered complaints of the restless dead in nearby graves. Rulfo1First published in the 1950s, Pedro Páramo is still considered one of the most significant contributions in Latin American fiction. Rulfo is such a brilliant storyteller -- the prose clean and sharp like a knife. The different narrators tell their stories in simple but heart-breaking language -- what the dead fear most is silence and the loss of communication. And as in fairy tales, there are evocative images of the natural world throughout -- intense heat and dust, followed by constant rain and mud, -- the very elements that come to define the dead in their graves. Having read it once -- I know I will read it again, just to savor the skill with which Rulfo orchestrates the chorus of voices in this story into a single piece -- with an ending that leaves me breathless. (No wonder Marquez said this novel was one of the inspirations for 100 Years of Solitude.)

PARFAIT!

A beautiful read

Inmejorable

What a terrific read! This book is considered to have paved the way for Latin American surrealist literature. It is a great translation, and an overwhelming assault on the senses. Left me haunted for days.

J’aime