Ninety-odd pages that rearranged a continent's literature.
Pedro Páramo
A man searching for his father enters a deserted Mexican town where the dead speak and the past refuses to stay buried.
194g
Weighs the same as Banana + Mini Bic Lighter
- Lightweight
- Carries You Away
- Fiction
Juan Rulfo wrote exactly one novel, in 1955, which is like saying the Sex Pistols only had one album, in 1977. The continent-wide impact of Pedro Páramo is the stuff of legend — García Márquez could recite whole pages. A man navigates a town to find the father he never knew, Pedro Páramo, but only finds a town populated entirely by whispers and the dead. It's short, it's strange, it is confusing to piece together. Ninety-odd pages that rearranged a continent's literature — don't fight the confusion; float in it.
Field notes
Rulfo had been imagining Pedro Páramo for a decade when he returned to his childhood village, thirty years after leaving it. A town of some eight thousand people had dwindled to barely 150. The houses stood locked, and at night the wind howled through casuarina trees planted along the deserted streets. Rulfo said that experience finally gave him the key to his novel. He had found a place where the inhabitants had vanished but their presence remained almost audible.