Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo

I had expected to see the town of my mother's memories, of her nostalgia--nostalgia laced with sighs. She had lived her lifetime sighing about Comala, about going back. But she never had. Now I had come in her place. I was seeing things through her eyes, as she had seen them. She had given me her eyes to see. Just as you pass the gate of Los Colimotes there's a beautiful view of a green plain tinged with the yellow of ripe corn. From there you can see Comala, turning the earth white, and lighting it at night. Her voice was secret, muffled, as if she were talking to herself... Mother.

"And why are you going to Comala, if you don't mind my asking?" I heard the man say.

"I've come to see my father," I replied.

Juan Preciado makes his way to the town of Comala at the behest of his mother, who has just died. She has told him that he will find his father there, Pedro Paramo. Juan is aided by a horseman named Abundio, and takes shelter in the house of a woman named Eduviges. Eduviges is shocked to hear that it is Abundio who has guided him, because Abundio is dead. But then, of course, Eduviges turns out to be dead, too. Everyone in Comala is dead: it's a town full of ghosts. Some seem to know it, and others not, but each gives Juan a piece of the story of his father, Pedro Paramo. Some appear as visions, and some as voices; they speak to each other as well as to him, and soon it seems they even claim him, too, as one of the dead.

Being dead, ghosts have a poor sense of chronology. The story of Pedro Paramo unfolds with little regard to the order of the action, and one often finds oneself trying to remember who in the story is dead, and who is yet to die. (Does this part come after the death of the priest, Father Renteria? No, here he comes to administer last rites...) But when taken as a whole, the story becomes one of power and seduction: Pedro, the wealthy haciendero who takes over the land of Comala bit by bit, by violence and extortion. The murder of his father, and Pedro's bloody revenge; the death of his son--a vicious rapist--thrown from a horse. And of course, Pedro's many women, some of whom are seduced by his wealth, and some who really lust for him, and the one woman he truly loved, the doomed Susana. As Pedro's son, Juan fits into this story, too, but somehow over the course of the book he seems to fade away, becoming as ghostly as his interlocutors, and eventually being absorbed wholesale into the story of his father and disappearing.

It was interesting to read this book shortly after Carlos Fuentes' The Old Gringo; both touch on the revolution of Pancho Villa in Romantic and expressionist ways, though the books are wildly different. Don Pedro is exactly the kind of haciendero that Fuentes' General Arroyo despises, though he manages to buy off the Villistas by offering them provisions and support. The dangers in Pedro Paramo are metaphysical--death, memory, madness--rather than political. Yet both capture the way power relies on, is created by, great violence, and the way many lives can be swallowed up by the greed and malice of few men.

I'm not sure what to make of Pedro Paramo. It's a book that seems somehow both entirely haphazard and entirely minimalist, something hewn down to its most basic parts. It is lyrical and elegiac, and rejects straightforward kinds of storytelling for a patchwork method that reminds me the way a blurred image might come slowly into view. Latin American magic realists and surrealists seem to have loved it, and one can see how it plays an outsized influence on the Spanish language literature that emerges in the following few decades, Fuentes included. And it's really like no other book in the world, which seems to me one of the highest forms of praise you can give to a book.