Pedro Páramo

By (author) Rulfo Juan; Translated by Weatherford, Douglas J.
Short description/annotation:
A new translation of the legendary Mexican classic of magic realism which went on to inspire the works of Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa
Description:
A GUARDIAN BEST NOVEL OF ALL TIME ''One of the masterpieces of twentieth-century world literature'' Susan Sontag With an Introduction by Gabriel García Márquez From one of the most famous and influential Mexican writers, and the father of magical realism, this novel is a stunning masterpiece of the surreal. Juan Preciado sets out on a strange quest, bound by a promise to his dying mother. Embarking down a parched and dusty road, Juan goes to seek his father, Pedro Páramo, from whom they fled many years ago. The ruined town of Comala is alive with whispers and shadows. Time shifts from one consciousness to another in a hypnotic flow of desires and memories, a world of ghosts dominated by the tyranny of the Páramo family. Womaniser, overlord and murderer, Juan''s notorious father retains an eternal grip over Comala. Its barren and broken-down streets echo the voices of tormented spirits sharing the secrets of the past in an extraordinary chorus of sensory images, violent passions and unfathomable mysteries. NOW A MAJOR NETFLIX FILM
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Pedro Páramo is not only one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century world literature but one of the most influential of the century''s books
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Rulfo''s moment in the English-speaking world has finally arrived. His novel''s conception is of a simplicity and profundity worthy of Greek tragedy, though another way of conveying its unique effect might be to say that it is Wuthering Heights located in Mexico and written by Kafka
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This brilliant Mexican novel, written in 1955, describes a man''s search for his unknown father with the haunting clarity and strange logic of a recurrent nightmare
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A strange, brooding novel. . . . Great immediacy, power and beauty.
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A powerful fascination . . . vivid and haunting; the style is a triumph.
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With its dense interweaving of time, its routine interaction of the living and the dead, its surreal sense of the everyday, and with simultaneous-and harmonious-coexistence of apparently incompatible realities, this brief novel by the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo strides through unexplored territory with a sure and determined step
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No reader interested in the vitality of twentieth century Latin American fiction can afford to miss this work
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The silences yawn in Rulfo''s writing. Its rhythms seem to slow time, and reality''s edges fray into a strange gulf ... Pedro Páramo is like hunting for a key in a building that is collapsing around you ... one of the more remarkable journeys in literature
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A founding text for literature in Central and Latin America, revered by Gabriel Garcia Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, this short novel is full of miraculous features
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This is the third time Pedro Páramo has been translated into English ... and I can only celebrate that someone has tried so hard to preserve the author''s unique voice. An outstanding edition and a game-changing translation
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Juan Rulfo''s novel defies logic. It is out to evade readers, to tease them for their attempts at understanding. Uncertainties, red herrings, and anxieties abound, all of which give Pedro Páramo its particular flavour
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There is no novel more mesmerizing and paradigm-shifting
Biographical note:
Juan Rulfo (1917-1986) is the author of what is probably the most important novel in Mexican literature. Pedro Páramo was published in 1955 and went on to