Pedro Páramo

by Juan Rulfo, Fundación Juan Rulfo Narrated by Mauricio Carrera

Overview

"Desconcertante, lista a inquietar a la crítica, está ya en los escaparates la primera novela de Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo, que transcurre en una serie de transposiciones oníricas, ahondando más allá de la muerte de sus personajes, que uno no sabe en qué momento son sueño, vida, fábula, verdad, pero a los que se les oye la voz al través de la 'perspicacia despiadada y certera' de tan sin duda extraordinario escritor." Con estas palabras iniciaba Edmundo Valadés la primera reseña de Pedro Páramo, aparecida el 30 de marzo de 1955 y conservada por Rulfo entre sus papeles. Desde entonces, escritores como Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Gunter Grass, Susan Sontag y Mario Vargas Llosa, o el cineasta Werner Herzog, entre muchos más de cualquier lengua, coinciden en calificar esta novela como una de las obras maestras de la literatura de todos los tiempos. La encuesta del Instituto Nobel de Suecia, de 2002, dirigida a un centenar de escritores y estudiosos de todo el mundo, ubicó a Pedro Páramo entre las cien obras que constituyen el núcleo del patrimonio universal de la literatura. El dibujo a tinta de la portada es de Ricardo Martínez. Apareció en la primera edición de Pedro Páramo, que se terminó de imprimir el 19 de marzo de 1955. Esta obra ha recibido una ayuda a la edición del Ministerio de Cultura y Deporte

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

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.)

Selden Rodman

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

Washington Post

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

From the Publisher

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

Buenos Aires Herald

"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."

Product Details

BN ID:	2940172939846
Publisher:	RM Verlag
Publication date:	12/23/2020
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	1,224,563
Language:	Spanish

Videos