Pedro Páramo

by Juan Rulfo, Douglas J. Weatherford (Translator), Gabriel García Márquez (Introduction)

Overview

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • SOON TO BE A NETFLIX FILM

"One of the best novels in Hispanic literature, and in literature as a whole.” —Jorge Luis Borges

The highly influential masterpiece of Latin American literature, now published in a new, authoritative translation, and featuring a foreword by Gabriel García Márquez

A masterpiece of the surreal that influenced a generation of writers in Latin America, Pedro Páramo is the otherworldly tale of one man’s quest for his lost father. That man swears to his dying mother that he will find the father he has never met—Pedro Páramo—but when he reaches the town of Comala, he finds it haunted by memories and hallucinations. There emerges the tragic tale of Páramo himself, and the town whose every corner holds the taint of his rotten soul. Although initially published to a quiet reception, Pedro Páramo was soon recognized as a major novel that has served as a touchstone text for writers including Mario Vargas Llosa and José Donoso. Now published in a new translation from the definitive Spanish edition by celebrated Rulfo scholar Douglas J. Weatherford, and featuring a foreword by Gabriel García Márquez, this new edition of the novel cements its place as one of the seminal literary texts of the twentieth century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802160935
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	11/14/2023
Edition description:	Reissue
Pages:	144
Sales rank:	3,792
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.50(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

Praise for Pedro Páramo:

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice

A New York Times Book Review Paperback Row Selection

“[Pedro Páramo] shows its readers how to read all over again, the same way The Waste Land or Ulysses does, by bending the rules of literature so skillfully, so freely, that the rules must change thereafter . . . It is a story of all revolutions: the landless against the landlords, the dispossessed against the powerful. It is a story of usurpation, extraction and sexual violence. Of stealing land, settling it and exploiting it and its people. In other words, it is a story of nation-building in the Americas . . . It makes more sense to map Rulfo within a constellation of writers like T.S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett, and Franz Kafka, who wrote in a kind of ‘foreign’ tongue, in that they allowed strangeness to seep into the familiar and turn the everyday into the uncanny . . . I began reading this third edition, [translated] by [Douglas J.] Weatherford, with skepticism. But I grew more and more enthusiastic as I went along. His translation is, by far, the best of Rulfo in English.”—Valeria Luiselli, New York Times Book Review

“A  work of pitched contradiction . . . This magnificent language achieves the apocalyptic dread of the original . . . Weatherford’s translation captures the primeval struggle at its core . . . I think the new translation is worth all the effort that has gone into producing it. It moves the story forward, so to speak, amidst the wider tale of literature. And it is a gorgeously engaging read at that.”—Nick Hilden, The Millions

“For readers of Latin American fiction, Pedro Páramo is a founding text . . . Douglas J. Weatherford’s [translation] moves Rulfo’s lyricism into a melodic, recognizably American voice . . . Rulfo forged a new language for sadness that is uniquely Latin American.”—Miranda France, Times Literary Supplement 

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

“Among contemporary writers in Mexico today Juan Rulfo is expected to rank among the immortals.”—Selden Rodman, New York Times Book Review

“The essential Mexican novel, unsurpassed and unsurpassable . . . Extraordinary.”—Carlos Fuentes

“Pedro Páramo is not only one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century world literature but one of the most influential of the century’s books.”—Susan Sontag

“That night I didn’t sleep until I’d read it twice; not since I had read Kafka’s Metamorphosis in a dingy boarding house in Bogotá, almost ten years earlier, had I been so overcome.”—Gabriel García Márquez

“A simplicity and profundity worthy of Greek tragedy . . . Wuthering Heights located in Mexico and written by Kafka.”—Guardian

“The silences yawn in Rulfo’s writing. Its rhythms seem to slow time, and reality’s edges fray into a strange gulf . . . Pedro Páramo is like hunting for a key in a building that is collapsing around you . . . One of the more remarkable journeys in literature.”―Chris Power

“Juan Rulfo’s novel defies logic. It is out to evade readers, to tease them for their attempts at understanding. Uncertainties, red herrings, and anxieties abound, all of which give Pedro Páramo its particular flavour.”―Full Stop

“This is the third time Pedro Páramo has been translated into English . . . and I can only celebrate that someone has tried so hard to preserve the author's unique voice. An outstanding edition and a game-changing translation.”―London Magazine

“A founding text for literature in Central and Latin America, revered by Gabriel Garcia Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, this short novel is full of miraculous features.”―Bookmunch

From the Publisher

First published in Mexico in 1955, Rulfo's ( The Burning Plain and Other Stories ) only novelpk is a modern classic. The opening of this brief yet complex work is deceptively simple: Juan Preciado has promised his dying mother that he will visit Comala, her hometown, and search for his father, Pedro Paramo. His mother's words lead Juan to expect a ``beautiful view of a green plain,'' but instead he finds a ghost town and learns that Pedro is already dead. Commingling past and present, obliterating the boundary between life and death (spirits walk the earth and corpses converse in their graves), the story depicts this small town ``at the very mouth of hell'' and Pedro, a man whom one local resident describes as ``living bile.'' An autocratic and amoral patron, Pedro resorted to deception, thievery and murder to get what he wanted. Yet the thing he wanted most--the love of Susana San Juan--remained forever out of reach as Susana, desolated by the loss of her first husband, retreated into madness and then into death. 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. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

"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