Review

Pedro Páramo review – Mexican magic realism is full of time slippages and perspective shifts

Adapted from Juan Rulfo’s influential novel, Rodrigo Prieto’s fractured drama of a son’s return home is confusing but powerful

Phil Hoad

Mon 4 Nov 2024 11.00 

Netflix adapts Pedro Páramo

 

Mexico

Netflix adapts Pedro Páramo, the great Mexican novel that inspired Márquez

New film of Juan Rulfo’s revered novel, considered founding text of magic realism, is first film adaptation in half a century

Thomas Graham in Mexico City

Tuesday 5 November 2024

“I came to Comala because I was told that my father lived here, a certain Pedro Páramo.”

Books that changed the face of fiction / Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo

Books that changed the face of fiction: Pedro Páramo

BOOKS & POETRY

Mexican writer Juan Rulfo’s dark fable Pedro Páramo ignores boundaries between the living and the dead – but is more than just a ghost story. It is, writes Stephen Orr, a book that created a genre.

Stephen Orr

Wednesday, January 30, 2019

Rulfo was the great Mexican and, later, by extension, Latin American writer. He was born in Apulco in 1917 at a time of radical change and experimentation in literature (Edgar Rice Burroughs was still publishing Tarzan novels, and Conrad, The Shadow Line, but meanwhile, Ford Madox Ford had just produced The Good Soldier and Joyce was busy at work on Ulysses).

Juan Rulfo / Pedro Páramo / Reviews

Pedro Paramo

by Juan Rulfo

BIOGRAPHY

Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo was a profound influence on Márquez, and in Margaret Sayers' new translation his prose is limpid and magical

Pedro Paramo 
Juan Rulfo
Serpent's Tail £6.99, pp122

'I came to Comala because I had been told that my father, a man named Pedro Paramo, lived there. It was my mother who told me. And I promised her that after she died I would go see him...' If these opening sentences sound eerily reminiscent of Gabriel García Márquez, that's not surprising: Márquez has cited this extraordinary short novel - a classic of Spanish literature - as the book that most profoundly influenced his early years. Mario Vargas Llosa and Carlos Fuentes also acknowledge their debt.

Francisco Goldman on Juan Rulfo

Juan Rulfo

Francisco Goldman on Juan Rulfo

BIOGRAPHY

Pedro Páramo is the most beautiful modern novel in Spanish—by modern I mean everything written from Don Quixote to today. It is also one of the most original, one of the most mesmerizing and strange. Juan Rulfo’s entire published literary output amounted to Pedro Páramo and one equally slender, and also classic, collection of short stories, El llano el llantas. That doesn’t seem all that surprising, because Pedro Páramo seems almost too unprecedented and singular. What would you do if, after writing a novel this uncompromisingly original and perfect—considering the role of luck along with everything else in this kind of perfection—you could never again match it? Gabriel García Márquez, living in Mexico, before he wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude, was so beguiled by Pedro Páramo that he memorized it. He could recite the whole book out loud! As if maybe then the book might begin to yield its secrets—its formal secrets, certainly, for there had never before been, I believe, a novel structured anything like this one. And yet it seems so effortlessly, naturally, seamlessly, and inevitably narrated. People talk about novels sculpting time in a new way, or defeating or subverting time, or of novels creating a world apart, in somehow autonomous relation to our usual reality: a life all their own, which is also ours. Pedro Páramo seems to do all of that. Yet its voices are so human they can easily seem even more human than those we hear ever day. And the “soul” of this book gets inside you and haunts you.

GOVE ATLANTIC

Juan Rulfo by Dylan Brennan

Juan Rulfo

On the Centenary of a Great Mexican Writer

Juan Rulfo

BIOGRAPHY

by Dylan Brennan

May 17, 2017

There is an exquisite sense of tension in the stories and novels of Juan Rulfo. The earthly and the ghostly are interwoven throughout. The first Rulfo story I read was “Talpa” and I’ve been hooked ever since. “Talpa” tells the story of a pilgrimage undertaken by a dying man, his wife, and his brother (the latter two are carrying on an illicit affair). Tanilo embarks upon a doomed pilgrimage in the hope that the Virgin of Talpa can stop his physical suffering. While alive he is riddled with sores and beset on all sides by the stench of death. While dead his presence seems to interpose itself between his wife and brother. In this way, the barrier between worlds begins to fade. A fragmented, non-linear chronology completes the effect. After this introduction, it was not long until I got round to reading Pedro Páramo, Rulfo’s first novel. Without wanting to give too much away to any uninitiated readers, in this masterfully constructed text, the real and the phantasmagorical, the substantial and the ethereal, all jostle for prominence throughout, leading to a startling revelation concerning the nature of both narrator and characters. I remember exactly where I was when I read it for the first time. I suspect most readers of Pedro Páramo feel the same way.

Juan Rulfo by Guadalupe Nettel

On the Centenary of a Great Mexican Writer

Juan Rulfo

BIOGRAPHY

by Guadalupe Nettel

May 17, 2017

I first encountered The Plain in Flames when I was not yet fourteen, a teenager. At the time I was a great fan of fantastic literature. I had already read Poe, Stevenson, Huxley, and I was devouring Kafka. Our Spanish teacher had assigned Rulfo at the beginning of the school year. But I had decided to postpone the read as long as I could, as I was quite wary of school assignments and preferred to devote myself to books which I considered more interesting. One morning, however, our teacher had announced that some of our parents had complained of its immorality and demanded that the book be banned. The Plain in Flames had suddenly turned into a prohibited read—one that, for that very reason, I absolutely had to get my teeth into. That day, as soon as I got home, I ran straight to my bedroom and read “Macario,” the short story which had caused much of the fuss at school. It was a first-person account of a country boy’s life in which, with complete nonchalance, were recounted the circumstances of his abandonment and the semi-erotic relationship he had developed with his nanny, in whose bosom he would frolic every night. I couldn’t put the book down till I finished it.

Juan Rulfo by Carmen Boullosa

Juan Rulfo

On the Centenary of a Great Mexican Writer

Juan Rulfo

BIOGRAPHY

By Carmen Boullosa

May 17, 2017

I first read Juan Rulfo when I was 15, and attending high school. By then I had already started fashioning my personal pantheon of writers. Emily Brönte was my first pick—she was queen of the gods. I added others (greedily, speedily) to my cult—Cortázar, Arreola, Borges, Bioy Casares, and Silvina Ocampo with their The Book of Fantasy (anthology of fantastic literature). Then Onetti;,Lezama Lima, Octavio Paz, Rosario Castellanos. Then Cervantes, Lope de Vega and, on the top shelf, Quevedo, who made me laugh to tears.

In Praise of Juan Rulfo / On the Centenary of a Great Mexican Writer

 

In Praise of Juan Rulfo:

On the Centenary of a Great Mexican Writer

BIOGRAPHY

Douglas J. Weatherford
May 17, 2017

Born in the Mexican state of Jalisco, a region acutely affected by the violence of the Mexican Revolution, Juan Rulfo (1917-1986) was an unlikely candidate to become one of his nation’s most significant writers of fiction. At six he witnessed his father’s body laid out in the family home after an assassin’s bullet took his life. He was only ten and living in a boarding school in Guadalajara when he received the delayed news that his mother had died—perhaps out of sadness—and had already been placed in the ground. If Rulfo’s familial circumstances were truncated, his academic career fared little better. He entered and abandoned a seminary, was unable to register at the university, and took a short-lived job that he despised as a foreman at one of tire-giant Goodrich-Euzkadi’s production factories. Through it all, Rulfo was nurturing a creative spirit that would burst onto the literary scene when he published a collection of short stories (The Plain in Flames, 1953) and a novel (Pedro Páramo, 1955) that would help usher in the so-called boom of Latin American literature that included Nobel laureates Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia) and Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru).

They Have Given Us The Land By Juan Rulfo

 

Photo by Juan Rulfo

They Have Given Us The Land

by Juan Rulfo

BIOGRAPHY

Translated by IIan Stavans with Harold Augenbraum

Juan Rulfo / Nos han dado la tierra

Juan Rulfo / It´s Because We're So Poor

Juan Rulfo / No Dogs Bark

After walking for so many hours without coming upon even the shadow of a tree, not even the seed of a tree, not even a root of anything, you can hear dogs barking.

You might sometimes think, in the middle of this edgeless road, that there would be nothing after it; that you would find nothing on the other side, at the end of this plain split with cracks and dried arroyos. But yes, there’s something. There’s a village. You can hear the dogs barking and feel the smoke in the air, and relish the smell of people as if it were a hope. But the village is still far away. It’s the wind that brings it closer. We’ve been walking since dawn. Right now it’s around four in the afternoon. Someone looks up at the sky, stretches his eyes toward where the sun is hanging, and says:

“It’s about four o’clock.”

David Kurnick on Fernanda Melchor / Books and Abandonment

 

BOOKS OF THE YEAR

DAVID KURNICKON FERNANDA MELCHOR

Books and Abandonment

Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season, which was a sensation in Mexico on its 2017 publication, arrives in English during a season of stormy weather for anglophone fiction about the US’s southern neighbor. Critical debate about these books has been conducted at a notably high decibel level. But it’s striking that the most reviled and celebrated recent novels about Mexico to appear in the anglosphere have been united by a fantasy of readerly empathy – an assumption that the most interesting thing about Mexican suffering is the attitude US readers might take to it. It’s a fantasy that Melchor’s Hurricane Season, a brutal and relentless novel evidently not written with an American audience in mind, declines to indulge.

In Conversation / Fernanda Melchor & Sophie Hughes

 

Fernanda Melchor

In Conversation

Fernanda Melchor & Sophie Hughes

‘It’s easy to forget the power of words in an era ruled by profuse, beautiful and entrancing images.’

24th February 2020

There’s no denying that Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season includes distressing stories of the very basest human behaviours. At the same time, thanks to the striking authenticity of the voices contained within it, the novel embodies a great human act of compassion, in that its author truly listens without prejudice to what literary critic Helen Vassallo has called ‘the monsters we make’.

The Oscar-winning film director Bong Joon-ho recently wrote some lines that I find as true of Hurricane Season as of his masterpiece Parasite, ‘. . . who can point their finger at a struggling family, locked in a fight for survival, and call them parasites? It’s not that they were parasites from the start. They are our neighbours, friends and colleagues, who have merely been pushed to the edge of a precipice.’ Fernanda Melchor goes with her characters to the edge of the precipice. As her English translator, I followed her there and was left changed and with many questions about her method and influences, manipulating readers, and the unavoidable lure of darkness. We touched upon some of these topics in during the following conversation, in English, in late January 2020.

—Sophie Hughes

 

Nightmarish realism: Fernanda Melchor on the haunting voices of 'Hurricane Season'

Fernanda Melchor and German translator Angelica Ammar have won the International Literature Award for "Hurricane Season." DW had a chat with the Mexican writer, whose novel depicts life in an extremely harsh society.

Fernanda Melchor's Temporada de huracanes (Hurricane Season; the English translation is to be released later this year) was featured as one of Mexico's best novels in 2017; the writer was also listed as one of the country's top authors under 40.

Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor review / Intense and inventive

BOOKS OF THE YEAR

Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor review – intense and inventive

A murder mystery set in horror and squalor, this English-language debut signals the rise of a Mexican star

Anthony Cummins

Tue 25 February 2020

A

structurally inventive murder mystery set in a lawless Mexican village rife with superstition, Fernanda Melchor’s formidable English-language debut takes the form of eight torrential paragraphs ranging from one to 64 pages long.

It opens in a blizzard of gossip related to the discovery of the corpse of a notorious local woman known as the Witch, who provided abortions for sex workers serving the nearby oil industry and whose rundown mansion – a venue for raucous parties – was said to hold a stash of gold eyed up by everyone from down-at-heel gigolos to venal cops on the take.

Book of the day / Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli review / Border crossings

BOOK OF THE DAY

Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli review – border crossings

A New York family takes a road trip south, in this rigorous and beguiling novel about child migrants on the US-Mexico border that has been longlisted for the Women’s prize

The 10 Best Books of 2019 / The New York Times

The 10 best books of 2019 / Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli / Review by Anthony Cummins

Lucy Hughes-Hallett

Friday 15 March 2017

A

family of four, in which neither child is child to both parents, leaves New York and drives towards the borderlands of Arizona. In the back of the car, along with the usual luggage, are seven boxes. Those belonging to the adults contain books and documents, CDs and newspaper cuttings. Those belonging to the children, aged five and 10, are initially empty but fill up over the course of the journey with images and transcriptions of sounds, traces of their experiences along the way.

Valeria Luiselli / A Life in 40 Questions: Harrowing Stories of Child Migration

Valeria Luiselli

A Life in 40 Questions: Harrowing Stories of Child Migration

By Dinaw Mengestu
April 28, 2017

TELL ME HOW IT ENDS
An Essay in Forty Questions
By Valeria Luiselli
119 pp. Coffee House Press. Paper, $12.95.

If there’s one anxiety common among writers, regardless of genre, it’s the work of bending an unruly mass of facts, events and memories into a coherent narrative — a story that a reader can pursue logically from beginning to end. Lives, real or imagined, rarely follow the clearly delineated start-stop borders that stories impose. Lorrie Moore, in the opening line of one of her most intricate short stories, noted this problem in the fewest possible words: “A beginning, an end: There seems to be neither.” Now the novelist and essayist Valeria Luiselli echoes it in the title and on the first page of her new book, “Tell Me How It Ends,” a work of narrative nonfiction born partially of her experience as a volunteer court translator for undocumented migrant children in New York. “The problem with trying to tell their story,” Luiselli writes, “is that it has no beginning, no middle and no end.”