When he approaches Comala it doesn’t look as his mother described it. On her deathbed Juan Preciado’s mother begs him to travel to her home village Comala and to look for his father the landowner Pedro Páramo and ask for his due. The photos below have been taken by Rulfo and many of them could serve to illustrate the novel which has also been turned into a movie.

It isn’t an easy book but it is highly evocative and contains a multitude of powerful images. It was called too Faulknerian, too loose, too heterogenous. When the book was published it was absolutely no success. In fact, the point of a writer’s life is to produce a great book – that is, a book that will last – and that is what Rulfo did. Susan Sontag who wrote the introduction to the English edition also touches on this.Įveryone asked Rulfo why he didn’t write another book, as if the point of a writer’s life was to go on writing and publishing. It’s always mysterious when someone writes only one novel, especially when it is an important one like Pedro Páramo. Should you read Spanish, you are lucky as the stories are included in the same book in the Spanish version.

Apart from this only novel, he left a collection of short stories El llano en llamas or The Burning Plain. Rulfo was a script writer and photographer (among other things) and his photos are quite impressive. It’s Juan Rulfo’s only novel and not only a classic of Mexican literature but one of the most important and most influential works of Latin American literature. Since years I wanted to read Pedro Páramo. Pedro Páramo” (1955) treats the physical and moral disintegration of a laconic ‘cacique’ (boss) and is set in a mythical hell on earth inhabited by dead individuals who are constantly haunted by their past transgressions.

Pedro paramo english