Pedro Paramo
by Juan Rulfo

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Book Reviews of Pedro Paramo

Book Review: In one book a career that surpasses Carlos Fuentes
Summary: 5 Stars

The book is a series of dozens of brief narratives, with no clues as to who is speaking or what the time frame is. Characters come and go and narrate their versions of events and only after you have captured a mental sense of the entire book and all of its narratives do you begin to notice links between the narratives and clues as to what the story is really about. That is why a lot of reviewers insist on a second reading, just to get a clear sense of what the story being told is really all about.

The story itself picks up on a long and widespread tradition of Latin American fiction, the regionalist narrative. From Brazil to Mexico examples abound of writers who have attempted to capture folkways or rural speech styles in their prose. If you know Spanish, nothing compares to reading this book in the original. A friend of mine whose parents came from a small village in northern Michoacan not far from where this novel takes place once got a chuckle when he first read a few pages of my copy of the book and said "You know, that is really the way people talk down there." He later read the book and told me that he couldn't help but imagine this novel occuring in his own parents town, that is how strong the sense of place is that is created here. This book is a snapshot of life in western Mexico (Colima, Michoacan, Jalisco) around the time of the revolution and the time of the Cristeros.

But Rulfo doesn't use "post-modern" fiction techniques for the sake of being clever. The disruptions and confusion that surge out of the narrative parallel the disruptions and loss of sense of order that Rulfo narrates: the aftermath of the Revolution and the government crackdown on the Catholic Church (as also told in Graham Greene's "The Power and the Glory") led to a war ("The Cristero Revolution") between faithful villagers and the federal government supposedly protecting them from the "opiate of the masses." Rulfo once said he was inspired to write "Pedro Paramo" when he returned as an adult to the small town where he was born, only to discover that in his extended absence the town had become a ghost town. The economic changes that emerged after the Revolution in Mexico destroyed an old way of life, and started a long process of emmigration to the cities or to the United States that to this day continues unabated. But this isn't a historical or sociological document, it is an amazing work of art and whether you read it in English or Spanish, it should be appreciated first as such.

Summary of Pedro Paramo

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