Pedro Páramo.

Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo is barely a novel at a scant 123 pages and under 40,000 words, but was apparently a major influence on post-colonial literature in Latin America, most famously as the book that inspired Gábriel García Márquez to write One Hundred Years of Solitude. Rulfo’s use of magical realism doesn’t seem all that groundbreaking today, but at the time it was published, it was.

Rulfo set the book apart from the beginning through its odd structure – seventy passages of varying lengths, some as short as a paragraph, all written as an interior monologue with very little descriptive prose. The novel includes three separate plot strands, loosely connected but woven together with frequent confusion as to which strand is the current one. Juan Preciado’s mother makes him promise to return to the town of his birth to find his father, Pedro Páramo, whom Juan’s mother abandoned when Juan was very young. On the way there, Juan has an unusual encounter with a strange man who tells him that Pedro PPáramo is his father as well, only to reveal that Páramo has been dead for many years. Juan finds the town, Comala, empty, yet full of ghosts and memories – yes, he sees dead people – and it turns out that the title character is the reason for the town’s decline and death, one that infects Juan as well, leading to an even more bizarre sequence of conversations he has and overhears from within his own grave. (Whether or not Juan is dead the entire novel is apparently a major subject of scholarly debate; I think he’s dead from the start, as the sequence that supposedly describes his death is unusually vague, but he doesn’t know he’s dead until that passage.) He learns that Páramo fathered many children with the women of the town, but became obsessed with the one he couldn’t have, Susana, who eventually returned to the town and married Pedro but never gave him her heart, after which he decided to starve the town to death.

Rulfo wrote the book after a visit to the town where he was born, one that was nearly depopulated as part of the great urbanization in Mexico in the early part of the last century. This shift also meant the destruction of local institutions in the rural towns that were the backbone of Mexican culture. The desolation and loneliness he experienced on that return visit formed the basis for the abandoned Comala of the novel – haunted by sounds and memories without a clear line between life and death (perhaps because everything is on the wrong side of that line). You can play all sorts of matching games between the main characters and the forces or events that shaped that period of Mexico’s history – Susana, for example, could stand in for that siren’s call of the city that ultimately wrecks the towns and people who heeded it – because Rulfo painted them with broad strokes and doesn’t provide a ton of detail in such a short work. He also gave his characters names with obvious metaphorical implications – Páramo is “barren,” Preciado is “precious,” Fulgor is “glow” – which is great fodder for academic interpretation, and I’m not sure it’s possible to read or enjoy this book without looking at that second level of meaning. The plot itself is so thin and unsatisfying that it can’t stand on its own and only rises to greatness when you consider Rulfo’s concern for his country rather than his characters.

Since Pedro Páramo needs analysis for the reader to fully grasp what Rulfo was trying to express, here are a few links I found useful in thinking about the book once I’d finished it:

• The Ghosts of Comala: Haunted Meaning in Pedro Páramo, by Danny J. Anderson
• Confusion, the Critics, and the Ambiguities inJuan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, by Ramon Paredes

Next up: Marilynne Robinson’s follow-up to one of my top 100 novels (her 1980 debut, Housekeeping), the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead.