To read Rulfo's stories is to inhabit Mexico and, in the process, to have Mexico inhabit you.” — Oscar Casares, NPR
"You can read Rulfo's slight but dense body of work in a couple of days, but that represents only a first step into territories that are yet to be definitively mapped. Their exploration is one of the more remarkable journeys in literature." — Chris Power, The Guardian
“Rulfo, through his photographs and his books, seems to be saying, Look! See! This world is here before us, it lacerates us with the anguished and ill-fated weight of its tangible reality. Come look!” — BOMB Magazine
“My profound exploration of Juan Rulfo’s work was what finally showed me the way to continue with my writing.” — Gabriel García Márquez
“The only Mexican novelist who has given us an image—instead of just a description—of our landscape.” — Octavio Paz
“A necromancer who is as surefooted among the dead as the living, the peerless Mexican legend Juan Rulfo made into book-flesh the elusive smoke and fire of his country, where the surreal is everyday, and the everyday is surreal: to read him is to imbibe Mexico. The legendary title novella – published here in English for the first time on the 100th anniversary of his birth – is a lost masterwork… The Golden Cockerel offers us the full balance of work by the author of Pedro Páramo: enough said.”—Barbara Epler, TANK Magazine
“El gallo de oro and Rulfo’s short stories are not inhabited by living corpses, instead of living beings that die when they die and are born when they’re born… The novel had not been published when I was in my teens. It can be read as a fable of the power of the powerless, and the rotten one of the powerful—even when their roots belong to the powerless. It has many other readings. The novel has gone wild in my mind.” —Carmen Boullosa, author of Texas: The Great Theft
“There is an exquisite sense of tension in the stories and novels of Juan Rulfo. The earthly and the ghostly are interwoven throughout.” —Dylan Brennan, author of Blood Oranges
“Acollection of neglected gems and quirky B-sides.” — Henry Zhang, Times Literary Supplement
“A text that is refreshing and diverse… Descriptions of the cockfights and La Caponera’s mariachi band evoke aspects of Mexico’s particular, vibrant culture, but as Weatherford points out in his introduction, there is a timelessness and geographical homogeneity that infuses all of Rulfo’s writing, allowing him to capture a universal quality that speaks to readers across generations and across borders.” — Nozomi Saito, Asymptote Journal
“Rulfo’s work is at its core about people who do their best to unburden themselves of the stories they never stop telling.” — Peter Orner, The Rumpus
“His is a text in which meaning is subsumed into an architecture of shadows and whispers, and into the ebb and flow of the vernacular.” — Suhayl Saadi, The Independent
“Far from the simple imitative realism of earlier Latin American novels, his essentialist work is on the level of myth and archetype.” — Rockwell Gray, The Chicago Tribune
“[Rulfo’s] work is built on an intricate lattice of time and space, but it doesn't seem planned so much as grown, something natural, inevitable, efficient, and effortless. All its paradoxes are innate.” — Jim Lewis, Slate
"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—Cosala." — Buenos Aires Herald
"...This is a book that is valuable in itself for its expression of the narrative talent of Juan Rulfo...Apart from the first images, which are truly cinematic and serve to introduce the protagonist...the reader soon forgets that he is reading a storyline written for the cinema." — Evodia Escalante, Casa Del Tiempo
"The work of Juan Rulfo is not only the highest expression which the Mexican novel has attained until now: through Pedro Páramo we can find the thread that leads us to the new Latin American novel." — Carlos Fuentes (on Pedro Páramo)
“His is a text in which meaning is subsumed into an architecture of shadows and whispers, and into the ebb and flow of the vernacular.” — Suhayl Saadi, The Independent (on Pedro Páramo)
“[Rulfo’s] work is built on an intricate lattice of time and space, but it doesn't seem planned so much as grown, something natural, inevitable, efficient, and effortless. All its paradoxes are innate.” — Jim Lewis, Slate (on Pedro Páramo)
“A simplicity and profundity worthy of Greek tragedy ... Wuthering Heights located in Mexico and written by Kafka” — The Guardian (on Pedro Páramo)
“What is remarkable about these sketches is that the characters are rendered with deep honesty; their faults are highlighted, celebrated in a way that is reminiscent of Chekhov's peasants.” — Publishers Weekly (on The Plain in Flames)
“As a masterclass in the short story, The Burning Plain is a joy, but it is also a vivid historical document of a terrible and remote historical era.” — Andy Thatcher, The Short Review (on The Burning Plain)
“The feeling that one gets while reading is of a smoky, dark night filled with suspicious shadows hiding still darker secrets that pour out of the words and sentences of the stories.” — Bhupinder Singh, A Reader’s Words (on The Burning Plain)
"A vivid, brutal depiction of life in Mexico... a literary gem." — Unabridged Bookstore
“Rulfo’s work is infinitely readable, inventive, and short… The Golden Cockerel & Other Writings shows Rulfo at his most intellectual and socially aware.” — Joshua Foster, Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts
★ 2017-03-06
Brilliant evocation of el otro México, "the other Mexico," by the writer whose inspiration underlies Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.Rulfo, who died in 1986, is best known for his odd novel Pedro Páramo, in which ghosts and living beings share the streets of a dusty town out in the middle of nowhere that may or may not belong on this plane of existence. Qualities of that bardolike place are evident in this similarly odd tale of Dionisio Pinzón, a youngish man who sets out to make his fortune in the unpleasant but widespread "sport" of cockfighting. With the long-suffering Bernarda, "a tough and attractive woman with a flashy rebozo worn across her chest," he travels from town to town, off in the provinces away from the metropolis that, Rulfo suggests, Dionisio barely knows even exists. As he travels, Bernarda turns up at the oddest times; "her calling," his godfather tells Dionisio, who wonders where he's seen her before, "is to wander the earth, so it's not hard to have seen her just about anywhere…." Though his golden cockerel falls in the ring in Jalisco, Bernarda brings him discipline and luck, eventually marrying him not out of love so much as loneliness. For his part, Dionisio, with his huge appetite for success, doesn't always treat her as well as he should—but winds up, in an ending quite reminiscent of Pedro Páramo, not to be able to live without her. With the novella are collected several sketches and other writings, most of which speak to Rulfo's preoccupations, chief among them death. "Death is immutable in space and time," one reads. "It's just death, without contradiction, not standing in contrast to absence or to presence." Even so, the narrator warns, it's bad form to make others weep when you go underground: "It's a rebuke that endures and that weighs on those who have died." A masterful storyteller whose dark view of the world isn't entirely cheerless or without humor and who deserves to be better known.
