Pedro Paramo

B-007 of 125:
Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo
Translated by Lysander Kemp
(Grove Press, 1959, 123 pp.)

This is the only novel Juan Rulfo wrote and yet it caused much envy, inspiration and influence on the other important novelists of the 20th century, most notably Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The narrator here is Juan Preciado who went to Comala to find his father, Pedro Paramo; this was the last request of his mother before she died.

In the place where his mother grew up before she left his father, Juan encountered ghosts of people—Abundio, Eduviges, Pyada, Sixtina—of a now deserted site. Nothing is left of the place, even nature abandoned it. He said: “I hear the dogs howling and I let them howl, because I know there aren’t any dogs here anymore. And on windy days you can hear the wind shaking the leaves, but you already know there aren’t any trees.”

At some point in the story (whose time is so non-linear, you cannot really exactly say at what point something happens), Juan also died and was buried. But it didn’t end there because he realized he was still conscious and was actually speaking to corpses (”What happens to these old corpses is that when the dampness reaches them they begin to stir. And then they wake up.”), until he heard the agony of Dona Susanita, supposedly Pedro Paramo’s last (and mostly beloved) wife.

Intervening Juan’s narrative are back stories of Pedro Paramo as a child until the death of his other son, the one he reared, Miguel. In one of my Fil 14 classes this sem, when we were discussing the dualism of body and soul in Spanish colonial texts (from Pope Alexander’s papal bull of 1494 to Urbana at Feliza), I mentioned in passing that Pedro Paramo could be Juan Rulfo’s critique of Christianity’s failure to save the bodies (and not just the souls) that suffered the inequalities of life on earth. Rulfo had to kill everyone in his novel, for, “you know what they say, that the dead never complain.”

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The best news is that there are plans to make a new film adaptation of this novel to be directed by Mateo Gil (who co-wrote Abre los Ojos with Alejandro Amenabar in 1997), and Gael Garcia Bernal is to play the lead (it, well, explains his photo above). 

~ by ecsamar on February 16, 2008.