Pedro Páramo

By -
Pedro Páramo, by Juan Rulfo

As I've confessed several times here, Latin American literature is one of the things I'm not very good at.  So I purposely put a few titles on my Classics Club list, so that I would jolly well have to read some.   Several of those didn't work out as I hoped, so I've done some switching around as I've learned a bit more, and this is one of my replacement titles.

Juan Rulfo, besides being mentioned in the Shiki Nagaoka book I wrote about the other day, became a major literary figure in Mexico in the 1950s.  His surrealism, vivid imagery, and inclusion of magic in his novels was a new departure in Latin American literature and was a large part of the movement to magical realism that is so well-known.  So here we go, one of the earlier works of magical realism:

He is traveling to Comala, his mother's home village.  She is dead, but told him that his father, Pedro Páramo, was there.  The village is empty now -- nearly all the people are gone -- but his mother's friend puts him up for the night.  Except she isn't there either; Comala is now populated exclusively by the dead.  At first, we just catch little vignettes as the Comala ghosts show us their former lives.  Then we're drawn deeper in, even into the graves themselves as people converse between coffins and rehash events.  Eventually we know Pedro Páramo's story, which is also the story of Comala.

An interesting novel and a fairly short and easy read, for magical realism, so not a bad way to get started in the world of Latin American literature (in case you're trying to learn about it too.)

Comments

  1. MudpuddleDecember 12, 2016 at 9:41 PM

    i visited Comala once: nice little town with the usual huge gorgeous cathedral; populated by the dead makes sense as it's right at the foot of an active volcano...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Esther | Chapter AdventuresDecember 13, 2016 at 7:38 AM

    I suck at Latin American literature... and I'm from Latin America! I do love magical realism and have read a few classics, but I want to read more for sure.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more