Pedro Páramo

by Juan Rulfo, Margaret Sayers Peden (Translator), Susan Sontag (Foreword by)

Overview

Dentro de su brevedad, determinada por el rigor y la concentración expresiva, Pedro Páramo sintetiza la mayor parte de los temas que han interesado siempre a los mexicanos, ese misterio nacional que el talento de Juan Rulfo ha sabido condensar por medio de los cotidianos habitantes de Comala, región inscrita ya en la mitología literaria universal.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802133908
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	03/10/1994
Edition description:	English-language Edition
Pages:	128
Sales rank:	264,836
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 7.75(h) x (d)

About the Author

Juan Rulfo (1918-1986) was born in Sayula, in the state of Jalisco, Mexico. His collection of short stories, The Burning Plain, and Pedro Páramo established him as a major literary figure in Latin America.

Table of Contents

• Pedro Páramo
• Juan Rulfo: A Biographical Note

Editorial Reviews

A strange, brooding novel. . . . Great immediacy, power, and beauty.” —The Washington Post

“A powerful fascination . . . vivid and haunting; the style is a triumph.” —New York Herald Tribune

“When Susan Sontag, in her foreword to this book, calls Pedro Páramo ‘one of the masterpieces of 20th-century world literature,’ she is not being hyperbolic. 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. . . . Having it now in all its depth and texture is a major event for which the publisher and the translator, Margaret Sayers Peden, deserve thanks.” —James Polk, New York Times Book Review

“No reader interested in the vitality of 20th century Latin American fiction can afford to miss this work.” —Rockwell Gray, Chicago Tribune

“As close to perfect as a piece of writing gets.” —Sheila Farr, Seattle Weekly

“A modern classic. . . . Peden’s lucid translation does justice to a tale that is firmly rooted in its own culture yet so fundamentally human in its focus that it speaks across cultural borders.” —Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

First published in Mexico in 1955, Rulfo's ( The Burning Plain and Other Stories ) only novelpk is a modern classic. The opening of this brief yet complex work is deceptively simple: Juan Preciado has promised his dying mother that he will visit Comala, her hometown, and search for his father, Pedro Paramo. His mother's words lead Juan to expect a ``beautiful view of a green plain,'' but instead he finds a ghost town and learns that Pedro is already dead. Commingling past and present, obliterating the boundary between life and death (spirits walk the earth and corpses converse in their graves), the story depicts this small town ``at the very mouth of hell'' and Pedro, a man whom one local resident describes as ``living bile.'' An autocratic and amoral patron, Pedro resorted to deception, thievery and murder to get what he wanted. Yet the thing he wanted most--the love of Susana San Juan--remained forever out of reach as Susana, desolated by the loss of her first husband, retreated into madness and then into death. Peden's lucid translation does justice to a tale that is firmly rooted in its own culture yet so fundamentally human in its focus that it speaks across cultural borders. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

"Among contemporary writers in Mexico today, Juan Rulfo is expected to rank among the immortals." -- The New York Times Book Review

Selden Rodman

"A strange, brooding novel... Great immediacy, power, and beauty."

Washington Post

"Octavio Paz has said that Juan Rulfo 'is the only Mexican novelist who has given us an image—instead of just a description—of our landscape.' By the same token we could say that Josephine Sacabo is the only photographer who has given us an image of that most elusive of landscapes conceived by Juan Rulfo—Comala."

Buenos Aires Herald