Pedro Páramo

by Juan Rulfo, Margaret Sayers Peden (Translator), Susan Sontag (Foreword by)

Overview

A masterpiece of the surreal, this stunning novel from Mexico depicts a man’s strange quest for his heritage. Beseeched by his dying mother to locate his father, Pedro Páramo, whom they fled from years ago, Juan Preciado sets out for Comala. Comala is a town alive with whispers and shadows—a place seemingly populated only by memory and hallucinations. Built on the tyranny of the Páramo family, its barren and broken-down streets echo the voices of tormented spirits sharing the secrets of the past.

First published to both critical and popular acclaim in 1955, Pedro Páramo represented a distinct break with earlier, largely "realist" novels from Latin America. Rulfo’s entrancing mixture of vivid sensory images, violent passions, and inexplicable sorcery—a style that has come to be known as ‘magical realism”—has exerted a profound influence on subsequent Latin American writers, from Jos’ Donoso and Carlos Fuentes to Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel Garcia Márquez.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802133908
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	03/10/1994
Edition description:	English-language Edition
Pages:	128
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 7.75(h) x (d)

About the Author

Juan Rulfo (1918-1986) was born in Sayula, in the state of Jalisco, Mexico. His collection of short stories, The Burning Plain, and Pedro Páramo established him as a major literary figure in Latin America.

Table of Contents

• Pedro Páramo
• Juan Rulfo: A Biographical Note

Editorial Reviews

A strange, brooding novel. . . . Great immediacy, power, and beauty.” —The Washington Post

“A powerful fascination . . . vivid and haunting; the style is a triumph.” —New York Herald Tribune

“When Susan Sontag, in her foreword to this book, calls Pedro Páramo ‘one of the masterpieces of 20th-century world literature,’ she is not being hyperbolic. With its dense interweaving of time, its routine interaction of the living and the dead, its surreal sense of the everyday, and with simultaneous—and harmonious—coexistence of apparently incompatible realities, this brief novel by the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo strides through unexplored territory with a sure and determined step. . . . Having it now in all its depth and texture is a major event for which the publisher and the translator, Margaret Sayers Peden, deserve thanks.” —James Polk, New York Times Book Review

“No reader interested in the vitality of 20th century Latin American fiction can afford to miss this work.” —Rockwell Gray, Chicago Tribune

“As close to perfect as a piece of writing gets.” —Sheila Farr, Seattle Weekly

“A modern classic. . . . Peden’s lucid translation does justice to a tale that is firmly rooted in its own culture yet so fundamentally human in its focus that it speaks across cultural borders.” —Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

"Among contemporary writers in Mexico today, Juan Rulfo is expected to rank among the immortals." -- The New York Times Book Review

Selden Rodman

"A strange, brooding novel... Great immediacy, power, and beauty."

Washington Post

"Octavio Paz has said that Juan Rulfo 'is the only Mexican novelist who has given us an image—instead of just a description—of our landscape.' By the same token we could say that Josephine Sacabo is the only photographer who has given us an image of that most elusive of landscapes conceived by Juan Rulfo—Comala."

Buenos Aires Herald