Second reading. Surprisingly readable prose for such a dense and multi-layered story. A young man follows his mother's dying wish to return to the village of her birth and make Pedro Páramo, the young man's father, pay for the abandonment of his family. What follows is something like Dante's descent into hell as the young man, Juan Preciado, and his Virgil, a burro-driver named Abundio — also a son of Páramo — make their way down the long road to the village. The village of the mother's youth is...

Written in the style of magical realism, Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo is quite an unusual novel. Its characters are ghosts and the only one living dies and becomes a ghost too in mid-story. Imagine reading a story told by ghosts! It is weird, but it also has some attraction because of the novelty. The story is about a young man's journey to Comala to meet his long-lost father who he finds to be dead. And what is interesting is that so are the rest of the townspeople. It's basically a ghost city to

“The sky was filled with fat stars, swollen from the long night. The moon had risen briefly and then slipped out of sight. It was one of those sad moons that no one looks at or pays attention to. It had hung there a while, misshapen, not shedding any light, and then gone to hide behind the hills.” Pedro Páramo ~~ Juan RulfoThere are few books that leave me speechless when turning the lasting page. Pedro Paramo was one such book. Pedro Paramo may also be the scariest ghost story ever written.Auth...

Pedro Páramo is filled with beauty and sadness. Told in fragments, the novel constantly shifts perspectives, blending past and future, living and dead, in chaotic, unpredictable ways. This makes the narrative challenging to follow, but creates a chilling, dreamlike atmosphere, and a kind of extra-temporal unification of cause and effect. There is an implied tragedy at the heart of the novel, the nature of which is gradually revealed, though never completely.Because of its disconnected and crypti...

Attempt 2, 2014:It’s hard to describe what this book means to me. On about my second reading I wrote the kneejerk emotive “You Should Read This” response below. Now, on my fourth or fifth, I wonder if I’m any closer to a lucid appraisal.He doesn’t give you much, Rulfo. If there’s such thing as a minimalist he’s probably it, though not with the magnifying-glass focus of late-period Beckett, or the plainspokenness of Hemingway or Carver. Gothic, otherworldly, broad (though not vast) in scope, Pedr...

«ah, illusions, they are hard” I'm not really a big fan of magical realism, and in general I don't like Latin American literature that is heavily steeped in it. So I started this iconic novel with some skepticism. The Mexican Juan Rulfo published it in 1955, and it is generally seen as the real start of the hype around Latin American literature. The novel begins fairly conventionally, with the story of a young man who travels to the village of his presumed father, Pedro Paramo. But what follo

“She [your mother] told me you were coming. She said you’d arrive today.”“My mother…my mother is dead.”“Oh, then that’s why her voice sounded so weak.” This book, really a novella (120 pages), is a Mexican classic, an early example of magical realism. It’s original, startling, unique. According to Wikipedia Gabriel García Márquez has said 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

Juan Rulfo was one of those who stood at the beginning of magic realism.Pedro Páramo is a descent into the hell of human memory, a plunge into an abyss of the dire past – the hero travels to find his father but he finds himself astray in the land of the dead.Behind him, as he left, he heard the murmuring.I am lying in the same bed where my mother died so long ago; on the same mattress, beneath the same black wool coverlet she wrapped us in to sleep. I slept beside her, her little girl, in the sp...

People often talk about 'Before and After', as in before something momentous happens and after it has happened. There's a 'Before and After' in this book, and though the transition between the two happens from one moment to the next, there's an immeasurable distance between them in everything except time. I think of that distance as the distance between the town of Colima and the town of Comala, both real places in Mexico. When his mother dies, Juan Preciado sets out from his home in Colima to f...

Ghost TownThe Communion of Saints is a somewhat arcane Christian doctrine proclaiming that all of us, the living and the dead, are in this together. ‘This’ being the trek toward ultimate salvation. This is the theme that permeates Pedro Paramo. I think it accounts for the frequent appearances of the dead in helpful and discursive roles. But also for the devastation of the community itself which has never pulled its weight, as it were, by battling the forces of evil, namely the un-faithful. Conti...

A complete panorama composed of mood & atmosphere, "Pedro Paramo" came highly recommended by Mario Vargas Llosa in his "Letters to a Young Novelist" aka the writer's own poetics. I must say that I had some difficulty with the Spanish at first; it took me longer to get through the short book than I intended. The different vignettes come together to form the corpus of the awful man, brutal rancher, sadistic ladies man, Pedro Paramo (like different POVs coalesce in Mrs. Dalloway to describe & embod...

Spoken as a literary dream this grim tale bordering the fine line of fable switches past and present, points of view, with whispered elegance. Images are presented out of swirls of dust and cloud myth, tale and hallucination, revealing the cutthroat lives of existence.I just finished Knausgaard's, My Struggle #1 and #2 wouldn't arrive for two days. Unable to be without reading a book I picked the slimmest off my shelves in my library. Even being a slow reader 124 pages could be finished

Absolutely brilliant. First published in 1955, Pedro Paramo was the only novel by Mexican author and photographer, Juan Rulfo, yet it established his name as one of the most important Spanish-language writers of the 20th century together with Jorge Luis Borges. This novel started the genre, magical realism that inspired Gabriel Garcia Marquez to write his masterpiece, 100 Years of Solitude. In fact, Marquez liked the novel so much that he read it many times and could recite portions of it for ma...

Written by immigration agent Juan Rulfo with state funding and published in Mexico in 1955, this psychotic novel does everything one could never dream of if limited by contemporary creative-writing dogma. The book's structure fragments and its protagonist fades out of the narrative, there is no clear plot-line, no hooks, no character development arcs, no climax, no epilogue, and one is left with an existential sense of dislocation and uncertainty. If this novel were to have been written today, w...

A Mexican magical realism's response to The Spoon River Anthology, Rulfo's brilliant novella isn't going to give up its goods on the first reading. Beyond the requirement of careful character and dialogue parsing, I sense there are different ways to approach the text. We learn in the opening sentences that our protagonist is on his way to visit a father he has never met at the behest of a death-bed request from his mother. After reading this book twice now (and the reviews of my brilliant GR fri...