Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo

I only recently heard about this book from 1955. It was profiled in the New York Times in December, repeating praises from readers such as Jorge Luis Borges and Susan Sontag, and comparisons to Ulysses and The Waste Land in the way it creates a new mode of literature. The cause of the New York Times piece was to praise a new translation by Douglas J. Weatherford. The new edition also features a forward by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, from 1980 where he recounts how his first introduction to the book twenty years earlier opened up a new path in his own writing, leading to One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Marquez compares Rulfo, the author, to no less than Sophocles.

I read it on the plane to Mexico. So what is it?

The book begins with a narrator, Juan Preciado telling us that he is traveling to a city in Mexico called Comala, to find his father, Pedro Paramo, following a dying request from his mother. She says, “Don’t ask him for anything. Just insist on what’s ours. What he was obliged to give me but never did… Make him pay dearly, my son, for the indifference he shows toward us.” The man begins walking toward Comala with a muleteer going in that direction. They converse on the road. The man learns that Pedro Paramo owned a vast ranch called Media Luna, and that he died many years ago.

The man arrives in the town and finds it nearly empty. He has the name of a woman to stay with given to him by the muleteer who then continues on his way. Magically, the woman says she was expecting him, told he would come that day by his mother, who of course was far away and dead. The woman sees other ghosts, too, indeed the whole town is populated by ghosts and throughout the novel it’s hard to know who is dead and who is alive.

Juan Preciado’s narrative is interrupted by a scene of his father as a young man mooning after a girl named Susana. And then that story is interrupted by a story from the woman Juan Preciado is staying with remembering the evening that one of Pedro Paramo’s sons, Miguel Paramo, was killed in a riding accident and his confused ghost visited her at her window.

The book swirls about in this way: poetical, mystical, loosed from time. Pedro Paramo grows into a powerful, rich man. He uses force and fraud to get his way. He seduces woman, he manipulates men. He pursues Susana as a lifelong love. His story is set against the background of the Mexican Revolution, and that, too, becomes part of the story. A Priest named Father Renteria struggles with his faith.

Juan Preciado’s visit to Comala is the most recent incident in the novel. Everything else is told through flashbacks or the memories of the ghosts he finds in Comala. At nearly exactly the halfway point of the novel, Juan Preciado dies himself, but the story goes on little changed as he continues to converse with a dead woman buried beside him and they hear the voices of the other dead souls around them.

I’m not sure I can do this novel justice. The story is rich and complex. It doesn’t lend itself to an easy synopsis. And to reduce the beauty of the language and the complex telling to a straightforward plot seems a betrayal. Let me only say that the book is wonderful. Highly worth reading, and one I plan to read again, maybe many times.