Cover of Grove’s new translation of Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo
Even when it is not being framed in terms of the “Boom,” critics and publicists keep defining Pedro Páramo through reductive comparisons to other texts. The back cover of the new UK edition quotes a line from the Guardian that describes the novella as “Wuthering Heights located in Mexico and written by Kafka.” Pedro Páramo deserves better. It has sold over a million copies in English and is being adapted by Netflix. It should be read on its own terms.
Pedro Páramo, whose name means “rock” and “barren plain,” is a harsh, feudal lord. A womanizer and the de facto owner of the fertile land around Comala, he is associated with fecundity—yet his life and afterlife are defined by fatalities. There is the death of his father, killed by mistake at a wedding; the death of his rapist son, thrown off his horse; and the many deaths for which Pedro Páramo is himself responsible. These include Juan Preciado, “just about everyone who attended” the wedding where his father was shot, the concubine who dies in childbirth, the father of his forced bride Susana San Juan, and Susana San Juan herself. As revenge for the lack of mourning shown to Susana San Juan by the villagers, Pedro Páramo starts a famine that reflects the barrenness of his name:
—I’ll cross my arms and Comala will die of hunger.
And that’s what he did.
Pedro Páramo is a nonlinear story written in short scenes that resemble snapshots. It is polyphonic—told by Juan Preciado, at least one third-person narrator, and characters who resemble a chorus. It is a story of archetypes—an everyman, a tyrant, and a son searching for a father. It regularly alludes to Greek tragedy, particularly Sophocles’s Oedipus the King. As in his short story collection The Burning Plain (1953), Rulfo explores themes of land and displacement that evoke the history of Mexico and of colonial and postcolonial Latin America.
Rulfo’s description and dialogue are spare, casting an uncanny atmosphere over Comala and the text. Juan Preciado perceives that “everything was completely quiet, the only sound a moth falling through the air and the whispering of silence.” Rulfo’s voice, particularly in the scenes set in the “underworld,” can be laconic, mythic, and surreal.
No. 3 - Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo tr. by Douglas J. Weatherfordq (@groveatlantic.bsky.social)
The ‘everyone who heard the Velvet Underground album started a band’ for the LatAm Boom but s/b viewed on its own as masterpiece of surrealism
Excerpts from Harvard Review
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