#69 Review of Pedro Paramo
Tom Wells
Praised as the greatest work of Mexican fiction by the likes of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Carlos Fuentes, this is a challenging piece chock full of theme, character, setting, mood and imagery but almost no plot. Juan Rulfo reportedly wrote a 400-page novel and then stripped it back to its barest essence. What is left are a series of snippets about the occupants of the town of Calamo, a once thriving pueblo driven by the cruel, megalomaniacal Pedro Páramo to ruin and dereliction, peopled mostly by apparitions, now literally a ghost town. Rulfo’s microcosm encompasses what I imagine to be the major themes of Mexican life and history: the thin line between the living and the dead; the brutality of those in authority and the collusion of the Church in enabling it; the bubbling undercurrent of violent revolution. My difficulty with the book is two-fold: by not knowing Spanish, I feel I am missing the doubtless lyricism of the prose; and by having lived all my life in quiet First World suburbs, I can only imagine the angry joylessness of the few at the top and the unremitting hardship endured by everybody else.
****
