Gabriel Garcia Marquez said his discovery of Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo in 1961 was “life-changing”, and which opened his way to the composition of his masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude. This literary trivia in itself speaks volumes of the novel’s iconic status.
Pedro Páramo is one of the early precursors of the literary genre “Magic Realism” which emerged from Latin America. It subsequently paved the way for novelists like Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, Alejo Carpentier, Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa who had all experimented with the style.
Pedro Páramo has multiple narratives using elements of the surreal, the bizzare, the quixotic, the quotidian all merging into one. It is a daunting read with its sparseness being deceptive to the reader. It challenges the reader to believe in the “unreal”, which in itself, has implicit commentaries on life and human nature.
“I find myself slightly befuddled,” says writer Janice Pariat, who is currently reading the novel. “Rulfo employs a narrative that blurs timelines and voices,” she adds.
Juan Preciado returns to the town of Comala, which his mother had left when he was just a baby. His father is Pedro Paramo, the landowner, enforcer and tyrant of the entire town. Comala is literally a ghost town; Juan is taken in by a series of maternal spirits that guide him through the history of the town and its death, brought on by Paramo.
Paramo owns all the land and with the willing assistance of the church, most of the town is dragged into corruption, philandering and decay along with him.
As landowner, Paramo comes to infect the land, and violence suffuses the entire town. This is personified by Paramo’s son Miguel, who is a serial rapist and eventually comes to an end when he’s killed by his horse, before he can be killed by another man planning Miguel’s death.
Rulfo is clear that all the chaos and evil is arising from Paramo’s hands as when the old woman Dorotea, who has lost her son, makes a deal with Paramo to round up women for Miguel. When Paramo’s unattainable love, the insane figure of redemption Susana dies, Paramo shuts the entire town down, mandating that the farmland becomes dead and funding revolutionaries. He is eventually killed by another bastard son of his, leaving the town to the ghosts of its past inhabitants.
What makes the book difficult is the hopscotch narration, which jumps between Rulfo’s dealings with the residential ghosts of the town, his channeling of the non-ghost souls of those departed who exist in a mental limbo, and non-linear retelling or straight narration of the past.
Rulfo hears more and more levels of the story, and at the height of it, communicates with Susana, who is lost in the reliving of Paramo’s attentions, which she ignores, and her escapes to swim in the ocean, which constitutes her escape from Paramo. The structure is loosely a spiral and by the end of the story, Rulfo has completely disappeared, absorbed into the weave of fragments and voices.
“The novel jumps and turns and bends,” says Pariat. “Hence when I went back to it, it took me some time to follow the story.”
Pariat says she is “greatly enjoying the novel because of its sparse and lyrical quality”.
Reading suggestions for the week:
1. In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri
2. The Cosmopolitans by Anjum Hasan
