Rulfo, Juan "Pedro Páramo"

Rulfo, Juan "Pedro Páramo" (Spanish: Pedro Páramo) - 1955

This was our international online book club book for October 2024.

I really like South American and Central American authors, they are always interesting, they are different from our European or the North American ones,.

Juan Rulfo is not that different from the other authors of that genre. Gabriel García Márquez and Jorge Luis Borges had nothing but praise for him.

The book was interesting though quite confusing at times. You think you are at the beginning of November celebrating Dia de los Muertos (All Souls Day) because we accompany a young man into a village where his parents grew up but it is a ghost town.

It is an unusual kind of writing, so the story is hard to follow, you don't know whether you are in this world or the next, whether someone is dead or alive. The narrative is non-linear, so it jumps around all the time. But the novel is definitely worth reading.

Some comments from members at the meeting:

• The book was strongly magical realism, we did not get a good grasp of the plot, but found it poetic.
• It was quite eerily ghostly, at first it not being clear where the story is going, who is alive and who is dead and what is going on. Then the horrors started creeping up on what was going on in the town becoming just worse and worse. The lawlessness, the enabling of violence and murder and rich and powerful dominating the poorer people and women. It was a really interesting book to read, but not one I would pick up to read again.
• As we had read 2 other Latin-American authors, Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez , who had been said to have been deeply influenced by Rulfo, I could definitely see the connection, but found Rulfo to be more subtle in his approach to describing evil. At moments the writing was beautifully poetic giving a lot of feeling and nuance to the story.

Book Description:

"The highly influential masterpiece of Latin American literature, now published in a new, authoritative translation, and featuring a foreword by Gabriel García Márquez

A masterpiece of the surreal that influenced a generation of writers in Latin America, Pedro Páramo is the otherworldly tale of one man’s quest for his lost father. That man swears to his dying mother that he will find the father he has never met - Pedro Páramo - but when he reaches the town of Comala, he finds it haunted by memories and hallucinations. There emerges the tragic tale of Páramo himself, and the town whose every corner holds the taint of his rotten soul. Although initially published to a quiet reception, Pedro Páramo was soon recognized as a major novel that has served as a touchstone text for writers including Mario Vargas Llosa and José Donoso.

Now published in a new translation from the definitive Spanish edition by celebrated Rulfo scholar Douglas J. Weatherford, and featuring a foreword by Gabriel García Márquez, this new edition of the novel cements its place as one of the seminal literary texts of the twentieth century."