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.
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- you did not enjoy the book because your Spanish is not that great ...
My review at the bottom but.....please do not review if.....- you did not enjoy the book because your Spanish is not that great (why give it a bad review for your lack of language skills?)- You did not enjoy the book because it was too confusing (it's complex, not confusing, was Shakespeare a bad writer for his complexity?)- ***If you found it too "depressing" and "dark"*** (Any book who makes you "feel" deep emotions accomplished a rare thing, if you felt depressed, well that's personal, very personal)This book is taught in many universities and given to people who are just learning Spanish, why??It must be read by someone who can understand Spanish fluently.I recommend first buying it in English if your Spanish vocabulary is too narrow.******This is simply a MASTERPIECE, one that doesn't fade through time, history or between cultures.It is such a masterpiece that even the grand Gabriel Garcia Marquez from "100 years of solitude" knew the book by memory (it's a small novel). He said that after reading it he had such powerful emotions that he regained inspiration to write more and it was also the novel that inspired his style of "magical realism".Juan Rulfo's style is more on the dark side.This novel will make you feel you are hanging through time and space and gets you inside the minds of the deceased who still mourn their religious sins, imposed by the Catholic church. The novel is set during the "Cristero War" in Mexico but he never tells you, in fact he never tells you anything! ....I realized that the novel was reflecting real historical events told through the voices of "ghosts" and after you get into each character you get a different point of view of the church's role, the effects of poverty and the dynamics that played during this era where "hacendados" (landowners) controlled entire towns. Very similar to the FEUDAL and SERF times in Europe.Here Juan Rulfo gets deep into the conscious and the sub-conscious mind of the people from such towns, you get into the minds and hearts of the deceased who still mourn their sins, trapped between poverty and religious rules as the only thing that saves them, but also the rules who criminalize them.It is one of those novels that sticks to you for a long time, often without conclusion, it makes you "feel" but nothing is concrete.It is powerful, mysterious, humorously dark and very real.Attached is some the photography by Juan Rulfo, as I feel it depicts his only written novel as well......
Top reviews from other countries
Alex George
DON'T LISTEN TO THAT OTHER IDIOT"S BULLS*** REVIEW
Reviewed in India on January 26, 2016