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"Pedro Páramo" by Juan Rulfo (also known as, Suggestions for the reading book written by a Mexican author?)
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Re: the Mexican author Juan Rulfo (1917-1986)He is known for three books, including
the novel Pedro Páramo
the novella The Golden Cockerel & Other Writings
the collection of short stories The Plain in Flames
The Golden Cockerel & Other WritingsThe collection's title story, "The Golden Cockerel," has a strong sense of place, time, and culture. It's about a poor man, unable to work due to an accident. He rehabilitates an abandoned, hurt young rooster (=cockerel), bringing it back to life as his malnourished mother passes away before her time. Going out on the road, he creates a new life, learning the arts of gambling, an endeavor that pays off, changing his fortunes. The story is ripe with coincidence in that his topsy turvy circle of luck and misfortune makes a literary connection, almost supranormal, through the lives and deaths of his mother and later his wife. The setting is atmospheric, having some well-drawn, distinctive characters and activities.
Margaret Sayers Peden's translation of Pedro Páramo is lively, and Juan Rulfo's strategy with a character interacting with ghosts in an abandoned Mexican town and a fluid description of the setting keeps one reading to learn new revelations about the former inhabitants. It is not all diaphanous structures of darkness and shadows with glimpses caught of escaping sun rays. There is some grounding through the habits of the townspeople and through Juan Preciado's mission to visit his father Pedro Páramo in Comala given to him by his mother before she died. The Foreword by Susan Sontag is not overwhelmed with facts but rather with the literary stature of the work.
More about Pedro PáramoThe dilapidation of the town differs from Juan's mother's beautiful memories of it. The ghostly townspeople are restless because the priest has not returned to grant absolution for sins such as incest, murder, theft, suicide, wantonness, and callousness. The main character Juan Preciado meets them and becomes part of their stories, physically and emotionally affected by his experiences. The other effect upon him is his visceral reactions to the phenomena of nature. His work is considered that of magical realism.
My review:Next month's book for the World Literature group I am in on Goodreads, Pedro Páramo is one of the most important modern Mexican novels and was a major influence on Gabriel Garcia Marquéz and magical realism. It is a very difficult novel to understand even at the literal level of events. The novel begins, "Vine a Comala porque me dijeron que acá vivia mi padre, un tal Pedro Páramo." ("I came to Comala because they told me that my father lived here, a certain Pedro Páramo.") The narrator, we learn later, is named Juan Preciado. (Midway through the novel he is apparently replaced by another narrator, Dorothea; in fact the ostensible narrators are not really that important given that much of what happens is presented in short independent episodes without any obvious connection to the narrators.) His mother Dolores was the wife of Pedro Páramo, who married her because his recently deceased father owed her family a large debt; when she realized that he didn't really want her, she hated him and left him to live with her sister in another town. On her deathbed, she told Juan to seek his father and try to get what he owed her.
On the route to Comala, Juan meets a man named Abundio, who tells him that Pedro Páramo has died some time before. The town seems to Juan like a ghost town, and we find that it is, in more ways than one. Abundio advises him to seek out and stay with a woman named Eduviges Dyada, which he does for the first night. Eduviges tells him that his mother, a close friend of hers from childhood, has told her he was coming and the day he would arrive; he thinks she is crazy. She also tells him that Abundio has died long ago. After he falls asleep, we get a flashback which we assume at first is his own memories of childhood, but are actually the childhood memories of the father, Pedro, flying kites with a girl named Susanna; we find out later how important she was to the events which make up the novel. Throughout the book, we are led to think that we are being given memories of one character only to find that they are another character's.
He is woken up by cries that seem to come from nearby, but he sees no one around; the next morning another character (Damiana Cisneros) comes and gets him, telling him that Eduviges had committed suicide many years before and wondering how he got into the locked house. Later this character disappears when he thinks to ask her if she is alive or dead. This is all in the first few pages.
The book is told entirely in short episodes, stories told by the characters and memories completely out of chronological order and seemingly without connection. There are references to the Mexican Revolution and to the Cristero war. I will not try to summarize the plot, not just to avoid spoilers but because it is so intricate that I would have to basically retell the entire book. We eventually with a great deal of effort can piece together what happened and the life of Pedro Páramo. And then we have to interpret what it all means . . .
Pedro Páramo
Setting: Comala, a ghost town in Mexico
Title: An immoral, influential person, head of the holding Media Luna, has committed many sins, nevertheless has feelings, too.
Main Teller of the Tale: Juan Preciado, an estranged son of Pedro Páramo, whose dying mother Dolores sends him back to get what the man owes them.
Comala is a literal ghost town, no longer vibrant or inhabited as Juan's mother described it to him. Even Juan dies there, a strange scene with a shared casket. The murmuring, noisy ghosts only hear each other, but only Juan interacts with different spirits and listens to their stories about the town's history. As Juan heads into Comala, he gets a lift from a seemingly alive individual, a stepbrother Abundio, who plays an integral part in the conclusion. Juan meets a succession of characters, expanding the circle of knowledge about the townspeople.
Rulfo's descriptions evoke the atmosphere of 'magical realism' through light, shadow, solidity, air, and fluidity.
"I felt I was in a faraway world and let myself be pulled along by the current. My body, which felt weaker and weaker, surrendered completely; it had slipped its ties, and anyone who wanted could have wrung me out like a rag."--page 11The counterpoint to ghostliness is that the characters and events seem believable. These dead characters have not entirely left their earthly characteristics because the priest was absent to give absolution, or the dying person, such as Susana, would not want it. Father Rentería creatively explains his role to shorten the time the deceased spends in limbo.
In my opinion, the ending is much more elusive. Was Pedro Párama a double agent in the war with the armed revolutionary Villistas? Was he offended enough by the town's response to Susanna's death to take "revenge on the town," and what did he do? How was he intentionally or unintentionally responsible for "murdering" her? Finally, there is no description of Pedro Páramo's demise, but (view spoiler)
Besides his novel Pedro Páramo, Juan Rulfo also authored short stories, collected in The Plain in Flames. In the opening one, titled "They have given us the land," four men consider what they received--a vast, hot, hardscrabble plain unsuited to growing crops. Will they use it for something else?
"The Plain in Flames""Comadre Hill" recreates an era shortly after a land redistribution. However, its original owners continue as before, the sixty or so new owners of the division accepting Odilón and Remigio Torrico's claim of continued ownership. So it seems from the narrator, who wonders why people leave and do not return. There is local color in the setting. For the tale's teller, the account becomes confessional.
"Even Juan dies there, a strange scene with a shared casket." Very strange, at first I wasn't sure if he actually had died or if it was a nightmare."Was Pedro Párama a double agent in the war with the armed revolutionary Villistas?" I think he was more just an opportunist who was trying to keep control over the revolutionaries and avoid being expropriated by pretending to support them.
"Was he offended enough by the town's response to Susanna's death to take "revenge on the town," and what did he do? ? How was he intentionally or unintentionally responsible for "murdering" her? " One of the keys to understanding Pedro's character is his obsession with Susan. While she may have been close to him at the beginning, the high-handed way he brought her back after she had married someone else and his obvious violence certainly contributed to her insanity and death. His revenge on the town was extreme. He reminded me of Heathcliffe.
""Comadre Hill" recreates an era shortly after a land redistribution. However, its original owners continue as before, the sixty or so new owners of the division accepting Odilón and Remigio Torrico's claim of continued ownership." A very interesting story. So many of the "land redistributions" in Latin America and elsewhere were fake. The phony land redistribution to the serfs in Russia was a major cause of the Russian Revolution.
As long as we are talking about the stories, here's my review of that book:
A collection of sixteen short stories set in the llano, the plains in the state of Jalisco in western Mexico. (Some editions have a seventeenth story which was not in the edition I read.) The title story is about the series of peasant rebellions which took place in the area following the Mexican Revolution; two of the later stories, "Anacleto Morones" and "El día del derrumbe" are rather humorous, but the rest are stark descriptions of peasant life in the arid rural areas, full of hardships and violence.
The Plain in Flames (story 3): "It's Because We're So Poor"This fatalistic tale involves a family with a son (the narrator), three daughters (one remaining at home), and the parents during a river flooding the village. The father tries to support the young girl's economic future by purchasing a cow, a valuable asset to marry well. While all seems as planned, especially with a calf born, the unintended consequences of the flood disappoint those attempts for a better life.
"His work is considered that of magical realism." I think Pedro Páramo, together with the stories of Borges, Asturias' Leyendas de Guatemala (which I just read) and Alejo Carpentier's La reina de este mundo are the main precursors or sources of magical realism, at least in Latin America. It might be interesting to discuss just what magical realism actually is and how it developed (and how it differs from modernism, fantasy and so forth.) I sometimes have difficulty with understanding these kinds of labels.
James wrote: "...It might be interesting to discuss just what magical realism...is and how it developed (and how it differs from modernism, fantasy and so forth.).."Those are intriguing questions, James.
One difference between magical realism in contrast with fantasy probably is in the realistic portrayal of the characters and setting. In the former genre, characteristics are more faithful to the natural world as the reader would experience it. With that grounding in reality as a jumping-off point, the author can proceed to create some unlikely scenarios. In fantasy, the characters and setting are unreal from the start.
The author Juan Rulfo was also a photographer. The cover photograph for
The Plain in Flames
depicts a characteristic landscape he photographed. And, Juan Rulfo's Mexico by him
is an oversized book of photography featuring the stark outdoors and depicting the sea, plains, mountains, vegetation, historical stone sculptures, monumental architecture, and people going about their activities in those environments, with each sample identified in Spanish.
His son Juan Carlos Rulfo made an award-winning documentary, Juan, I forgot I don't remember (Spanish with English subtitles), an artful collage of interviews with those who knew Rulfo senior amidst their musical culture and landscape.
"
The Plain in Flames
"My favorite story in this collection is the final one, "Anacleto Morones." There is a lot of suspense as the reader wonders what the main character has buried beneath rocks: a wife or a habit of scattering rocks from it. There is an upswing in the action when a group of ten very mature townswomen wants him to lead the funeral service for their priest and his father-in-law. Although he seems the perfect host, periodically, one of them finds an excuse to depart after seeing that her tender remembrances of Santo Morones differ from his objective ones. Then comes the denouement, answering the who of the initial question but not the how.
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