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.)

I first learned of what is considered “one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century world literature” while reading Paul Theroux’s, “On the Plain of Snakes.” In his critique of Mexican literature, he mentions “Pedro Páramo” because, unlike many Mexico’s best-known authors, Rulfo wrote about rural Mexico. He mentions that the book was published in 1955 and was one of procurers of “magical realism”, which influenced many of Latin America’s best authors. When I told my Guatemalan wife about the book, she told me she “hated it.” Evidently, the Belgium nuns who ran her school in Guatemala made this obligatory reading in 6th grade! Oh well, obviously I got a late start to catching this great piece of literature, but was not disappointed one bit. According to Susan Sontag, an American writer, filmmaker, philosopher, teacher, and political activist described as "one of the most influential critics of her generation,” who wrote the foreword to the book, Garcia Marques said that “Pedro Páramo ” is a legendary book by a writer who became a legend. The story is about a dying mother beseeching her son to locate his father, Pedro Paramo, whom they fled from years ago With that, Juan Preciado sets out for Comala, a town alive with whispers and shadows - seemingly populated only by memories and hallucinations. Built on the tyranny of the Páramo family, its barren and broken-down streets echo the voices of tormented spirits sharing the secrets of the past. His only love, from a very young age, is that of Susana San Juan, a childhood friend who leaves Comala with her father at a young age. Pedro Páramo bases all of his decisions on, and puts all of his attention into trying to get Susana San Juan to return to Comala. When she finally does, Pedro makes her his, but she constantly mourns her dead husband Florencio and spends her time sleeping and dreaming about him. Pedro realizes that Susana San Juan belongs to a different world that he will never understand. When his only love, Susan San Juan, died, the church bells toll incessantly, provoking a fiesta in Comala. Pedro buries his only true love, and angry at the indifference of the town, swears vengeance. As the most politically and economically influential person in the town, Pedro crosses his arms and refuses to continue working, and the town dies of hunger. This is why in Juan's narration, we see a dead, dry Comala instead of the luscious place it was when Pedro Páramo was a boy. The local priest provides insights into the black cloud that seemed to hang over Pedro. “It had begun, he thought, when Pedro Páramo, from the low thing he was, made something of himself. He flourished like a weed. And the worst of it was that I made it all possible.” He tells of one of his parishioners confessing her sins, “I have sinned padre. I bore Pedro Páramo’s child…” The priest remembered the day he brought the child to Pedro Páramo, only hours old. He had said to him: Don Pedro, the mother died as she gave birth to this baby. She said that he’s yours. Here he is. Pedro Páramo never even blinked, he merely said: “Why don’t you keep him, Father? Make a priest out of him. With the blood he carries in his veins, I don’t want to take responsibility.” Father Rentería lived in hope that he would someday be able to fully fulfill his vows as a Catholic priest and tell Pedro that his son (Miguel, who was killed in a horse related accident) will not go to heaven, but instead, pardoned him for his sins in exchange for a lump of gold because he is too poor to survive otherwise. The author describes what Pedro’s son, Preciado, finds one evening in Comala, ….Nights around here are filled with ghosts. You should see all the spirits walking through the streets. As soon as it’s dark they begin to come out. No one likes to see them. There’s so many of them and so few of us that we don’t even make the effort to pray for them anymore to help them out of their purgatory. We don’t have enough prayers to go around. Maybe a few words of the Lord’s Prayer for each one. But that’s not going to do them any good. Then there are our sins on top of theirs. None of us still living is in God’s grace…. Sometimes the order and nature of events that occur in the work are not as they first seem. Midway through the book, the original chronology is subverted when the reader finds out that much of what has preceded was a flashback to an earlier time. Initially, the novel received a cold critical reception and only sold two thousand copies during its first four years until it was highly acclaimed as a key influence on Latin American writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Marquez claimed that after he discovered Pedro Páramo (with Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” the most influencing reading of his early writing years), he could recite from memory long passages, until eventually he knew the whole book by heart, so much did he admire it and want to be saturated by it. Marquez also revealed that he felt blocked as a novelist after writing his first four books and that it was only his life-changing discovery of Pedro Páramo in 1961 that opened his way to the composition of his masterpiece, “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” Jorge Luis Borges considered “Pedro Páramo to be one of the greatest texts written in any language. Evidently, it has been translated into 30 different languages, and the English version has sold over one million copies in the U.S. According to “WorldCat” the World’s largest network of library content and services, his works have been published in 40 languages. Juan Rulfo was a Mexican novelist, short story writer, and also a photographer. He is acknowledged mainly for two books. One of which is El llano en llamas (1953), a collection of short stories. Fifteen of these stories have been translated into English and appeared in The Burning Plain and Other Stories, which also includes his much-famed tale, Diles que no me maten! (Tell Them Not to Kill Me!). The second book is the novel, Pedro Páramo (1955), after which Rulfo did not write another novel. His photography works are archived at the Juan Rulfo Foundation, which bears more than 6,000 negatives of his photographs. Everyone asked Rulfo why he did not publish another book, and according to Sontag, who wrote the foreword to the book, “…as if the point of a writer’s life is to go on writing and publishing. In fact, the point of a writer’s life is to produce a great book—that is a book which will last”---and this is what Rulfo did.

My son's English teacher recommended this book to my son this past year because he was interested in how death is treated in literature as a senior thesis topic. I read most of the books my children are assigned in school, so I read this one also. It is a short book, by an author most of us have not heard about here in the U.S. While I read it, I wish I had been writing down the names of the various characters introduced because the book moves back and forth in time and the characters' lives are intertwined in interesting ways. I did not love the book when I read it, but I keep thinking about it many months later. I plan to read it again some day and I think that is when I will love it - some books have to be read more than once to truly be appreciated.

“Pedro Páramo,” by Juan Rulfo, is a courageous, audacious, daring book. It 1955, when it was first published, it was even bolder. There was probably nothing else like it up until the 1950s. It still stands today as a pathfinding leap into the world of magical realism as a genre of literature. A son’s quest to find his long-lost father, at his deceased mother’s entreaty, leads the hero into a world of spirits and ghosts, to a village that exists and doesn’t exist, where time (and the narrative) moves back and forth, and from first person to third person. Reading the book requires close attention, an open mind, and imagination. However, a just over 100 pages, it is a book one can read every 12 to 18 months, as the magical threads of the story gradually form a tapestry in the reader’s mind. A pathbreaking work of fiction, it is Rulfo’s only published book. It is, as Susan Sontag said, “A book that seems, in retrospect, as if it had to be written.” Richard C. Brusca (author of “In the Land of the Feathered Serpent”)

I bought this book because I am learning Spanish. I also bought the English translation. I saw one review that said that this is written in old Spanish which I think may be true. I am still not 100 percent fluent, but this book seems to be harder to read than more modern material. However I think that this has been helpful by pushing me harder. I do wish that I had bought one of the versions on the Kindle as it is hard to read between two actual books. The story is a great read and although I can easily comprehend the English version I like the Spanish version better, it seems to be somhow more impactful.

This short and wonderful book by Juan Rulfo has to be one of the very best books I have ever read. The story is about a young man who, after the death of his mother, searches for his father in his mother's hometown. Upon reaching this town our protagonist finds that the town is deserted and inhabited not by the living or even the dead, but rather the memories of those long dead. This is a story well worth the read I recommend it wholeheartedly.

I found that I needed a second reading of this interesting, short book to get all I wanted from it. Also discussed it with 6 members of a book group. It is one of a dozen or so books written in the magic realism mode that our reading group is discussing this year and it has helped me better understand and appreciate this type of novel.