These events, which marked him for life, form the historical backdrop to his work. Rulfo moved to Mexico City after secondary school and briefly attended the National Military Academy, but he ended up working as a government clerk instead. He also co-founded and published many stories in the literary magazine Pan. From , he worked as a traveling salesman for the Goodrich tire company, which allowed him to revisit the rural settings of his childhood that ultimately dominated his work.
After releasing his two principal works just two years apart, Rulfo published virtually nothing and stayed out of the spotlight for the rest of his life. In addition to writing fragments of further novels and a number of screenplays, Rulfo split the rest of his life between government service in the protection of indigenous groups and various literary organizations, like the Mexican Academy of Letters.
Rulfo has had a remarkable impact on Latin American literature, especially given how little work he produced during his lifetime. However he remains less known in the rest of the world, in part because his work—written in the rural dialects of poor farmers—is so difficult to faithfully translate.
A revolt broke out in protest and ousted him a year later. His opponent Francisco Madero replaced him but met a similar fate two years later, as did his successor, the general Victoriano Huerta. From , Mexico fell into a bloody civil war between three group: the Zapatistas, the Villistas, and Carrancistas the Carrancistas were most conservative group, who eventually won.
The government faced widespread resistance as it tried to consolidate its power over the following decades. When church bells started ringing again in , people across Mexico celebrated. His other novel from the s, The Golden Cockerel , was not published until He reportedly destroyed the manuscript for another novel, and he left behind fragments of two others.
When you walk in the street you can hear other footsteps, and rustling noises, and laughter. Old laughter, as if it were tired of laughing by now. And voices worn out with use. You can hear all this. I think someday these sounds will die away. Maybe they are all dead. Perhaps this is purgatory because there is a lot of talk of the priest, confessions, and waiting for sins to be forgiven.
A very short book, well-worth a read and quite a trip. Catorce, a Mexican ghost town from dailymail. Juan Rulfo was one of those who stood at the beginning of magic realism.
Behind him, as he left, he heard the murmuring. I am lying in the same bed where my mother died so long ago; on the same mattress, beneath the same black wool coverlet she wrapped us in to sleep. I slept beside her, her little girl, in the sp Juan Rulfo was one of those who stood at the beginning of magic realism.
I slept beside her, her little girl, in the special place she made for me in her arms. I think I can still feel the calm rhythm of her breathing; the palpitations and sighs that soothed my sleep I think I feel the pain of her death But that isn't true.
Here I lie, flat on my back, hoping to forget my loneliness by remembering those times. Because I am not here just for a while. And I am not in my mother's bed but in a black box like the ones for burying the dead. Because I am dead. The novel is the Gehenna of despair and the Tartarus of sorrow and there is nowhere to hide so one must pass through the labyrinth of insufferable agony.
Destiny makes us travel though the strange valleys… View all 8 comments. People often talk about 'Before and After', as in before something momentous happens and after it has happened. There's a 'Before and After' in this book, and though the transition between the two happens from one moment to the next, there's an immeasurable distance between them in everything except time. I think of that distance as the distance between the town of Colima and the town of Comala, both real places in Mexico.
When his mother dies, Juan Preciado sets out from his home in Colima to f People often talk about 'Before and After', as in before something momentous happens and after it has happened. As he approaches Comala, he meets a man called Abundio at a crossroads called Los Encuentros. That well-named crossroads marks the transition from Before to After. After, for Juan Preciado, is when 'from one moment to the next' no longer exists, all moments are now concurrent, and all places have disappeared except Comala.
There is no more Time and no more Distance. There is only Comala. Then I'd turn the blue-shadowed page and the words would be back in their bright white places, and I'd keep turning pages until once again, the words would fade into the blue shadows and disappear.
I became so used to this pattern that when there were no more pages left to turn, I went back to the beginning and started the bright white pages all over again, watching now for the moments when the words would take off like birds at evening, and following along behind them.
There is a Before and After in my reading life. View all 49 comments. Mar 24, William2 rated it it was amazing Shelves: ce , translation , fiction , latin-america , mexico. Second reading. Surprisingly readable prose for such a dense and multi-layered story. The village of the mother's youth is Second reading. The village of the mother's youth is now a ghost town in which the living and the dead meet freely. What we might call the present action is rendered in the first-person voice of Juan Preciado.
Spasmodically then the prose will switch to a third-person narration of life in the village long ago. Once we've switched to the third-person voice and back a few times, we begin to get a number of other first-person voices from those who once lived in the village. But don't let this put you off, for despite the multiple voices and a few touches of surrealism the book's not at all difficult for those who read attentively.
I suppose my favorite sequence is when those buried in the local graveyard listen to each other and comment on what is being said! Superficially, the novella seems close to Machado de Assis's own worthwhile The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas , but that's an acerbic comedy compared to this piece of profound gravitas.
Not to be missed. View all 19 comments. This town is filled with echoes. This is the starting point of the novel. Today it is a dead town, where ghosts of the past This town is filled with echoes. Today it is a dead town, where ghosts of the past remind only of defeats and failures. Though it is not a silent place at all. In each house, on every square you may hear whispers and lamenting. Over bygone times, unrequited loves and hardships falling on its inhabitants. And it was probably him who started all this glorious parade of Latin-American authors.
And I can believe why. It's nonlinear structure that resembles rather hallucinatory dream than neat narrative. View all 33 comments. Mar 16, Fabian rated it really liked it. I must say that I had some difficulty with the Spanish at first; it took me longer to get through the short book than I intended.
The different vignettes come together to form the corpus of the awful man, brutal rancher, sadistic ladies man, Pedro Paramo like different POVs coalesce in Mrs. Certainly its an exercise in style. Like Hitchcock's famous "Psycho" shower scene in which the protagonist meets her demise halfway through the story, this one has a voice which talks from beyond the grave.
View all 5 comments. Sep 11, Garima rated it it was amazing Recommended to Garima by: Some random internet browsing. Shelves: to-re-read , short-wonders , sui-generis , mycents , moments-of-huh , wehmut. I watched the trickles glinting in the lightning flashes, and every breath I breathed, I sighed. And every thought I thought was of you, Susana.
Like a message in the bottle, some stories float through decades and centuries on the endless ocean of an untold past and bear a timeless appeal by echoing few words of eternal desires — Wish you were here. Pedro Paramo is one such story. The moon had risen briefly and then slipped out of sight.
It was one of those sad moons that no one looks at or pays attention to. It had hung there a while, misshapen, not shedding any light, and then gone to hide behind the hills. A full circle of loss and search by exploring the dynamics of human memories on hearing the faint sounds of phantom voices is impeccably drawn by Juan Rulfo through his understated and lucid prose.
Highly recommended as a perfect reading companion for a short and memorable meeting. View all 32 comments. Ghost Town The Communion of Saints is a somewhat arcane Christian doctrine proclaiming that all of us, the living and the dead, are in this together. This is the theme that permeates Pedro Paramo. I think it accounts for the frequent appearances of the dead in helpful and discursive roles. But also for the devastation of the community itself which has never pulled its weight, as it were, by battling the forces of evil, namely the un-faithful.
Conti Ghost Town The Communion of Saints is a somewhat arcane Christian doctrine proclaiming that all of us, the living and the dead, are in this together.
Continuity is thus invariably lost - in individual personalities, in communal cohesion, and even in civilisation. The sort of cosmic fellowship of the Communion was worked out late in the 5th century and is included in the so-called Apostles Creed. For Christians its significance is clear: the communion that is shared in the Spirit transcends space, time and even earthly life. Yep, it includes what is more commonly known as ghosts, a group that is celebrated on November 1st throughout the Christian world.
The point, unmissable by all believers, is that souls are very real things that can wander around without material bodies, and that just such a thing is to be expected from time to time. Hence events like Halloween and the Day of the Dead. Christianity inherited much of its ideology of death from Ancient Greece.
For the Greeks, the rituals of death were thought to create the polis , the community itself. This was part of a complex ideology that distinguished between the heroic death of a warrior and the so-called Tame Death by accident or illness of the average person. Only the former had social as well as ritual significance.
It was the strength and determination of the warrior in death that built and held the polis together. The early Christian community coopted this idea of the heroic death, explicitly for its martyrs, and implicitly for all its faithful members.
The Communion of Saints was neatly divided in appropriate categories: the Church Militant those still fighting for their faith on earth , the Church Penitent souls spending time in Purgatory after they had fought well but atoning for their sins unrelated to faith , and the Church Triumphant those who having fought the good fight find themselves in heaven.
They say that when people from there die and go to hell, they come back for a blanket. Stray ghosts are loose everywhere. The village clearly is no longer a part of the Communion of Saints. You should see all the spirits walking through the streets… There's so many of them and so few of us that we don't even make the effort to pray for them anymore. The place is described as a virtual desert with no significant vegetation. The protagonist is Juan Preciado, John Valuable.
Is it a literary bridge too far to suggest that this is a reference to John the Beloved Disciple, purported author of the Apocalypse? This last book of the Bible has the striking image of a woman, traditionally interpreted as the Virgin Mary, standing in triumph on the moon. She does not triumph in Comala but is overwhelmed by the evil emanating from Media Luna.
Comala is forlorn, not just abandoned but part of another order of being entirely. Or the purification of their souls? Why engage in this sort of endless struggle therefore? Comala is a concentration camp for the souls of those who have given up the fight of the faithful. Hope is what drew Juan to Comala, and a promise to his dying mother about getting revenge on his father. What he finds is a Communion of Sinners. This is a Communion of Resigned Sinners. The locals have been beaten down by the corruption that surrounds them - by the land-owner and his agent and family, by the church and its demands for tithes and its claimed control over their eternal fate, and by each other as they pimped their own daughters and failed to stand up for their friends and family members.
Even the priest cannot be shriven by his colleagues. Without the Communion of Saints, those living in Hell look for alternative means of social cohesion. Revolution is an attractive alternative, but is rarely satisfying since there are heroic dead on each side.
And those who have not chosen a side die a tame death of no significance whatsoever. Unlike in the Dickens A Christmas Carol , the ghosts have no effect whatsoever except to confirm the obdurate evil in which they continue to exist. They cannot escape and they cannot end their existence.
They can only repeat events in their lives and testify to their regrets forever - among themselves and to whoever happens to be passing by. But the living are of no use to them and vice versa.. Feb 16, Stephen P who no longer can participate due to illness rated it it was amazing Shelves: favorites , re-read , latin-american.
Spoken as a literary dream this grim tale bordering the fine line of fable switches past and present, points of view, with whispered elegance. Images are presented out of swirls of dust and cloud myth, tale and hallucination, revealing the cutthroat lives of existence. I just finished Knausgaard's, My Struggle 1 and 2 wouldn't arrive for two days. Unable to be without reading a book I picked the slimmest off my shelves in my library.
Even being a slow reader pages could be finished Spoken as a literary dream this grim tale bordering the fine line of fable switches past and present, points of view, with whispered elegance. Even being a slow reader pages could be finished in two days. It opened an apocalyptic future vision of books being sold by the pound in a butcher shop. Beginning to read I was shocked by what I had in my hands.
Please think of this as a provisional review having slipped from the nest prematurely. I wish I had Rulpho's artistic genius to pare and mold this review into what it need to be. Lacking such I will re-read this maybe a couple of times, adding to or subtracting from this review while asking for your patience. Juan Preciado is asked by his dying mother to find a man named Pedro Parama in Comala and receive the money owed them for his disinteredness and their need to abandon him in the past.
Pedro has been dead for some time. The town of Comala appears abandoned, desecrated, stuck in dust and decay. Juan finds it cared for spiritually by a lapsed priest and the legends of the amoral ruling Paramo family.
The citizenry are souls, those already dead but looking for someone alive who has not sinned or one who has been forgiven and can pray for them, their release. The priest does not meet these parameters, neither do the flitting shadows still remaining. There is no one to lift these souls further.
The line between the living and dead has been calcified. Juan has found history, myth, hallucinations, and the unsettled bone dust of death. He has stumbled upon life on earth, a living death of sinners where there are no forgiven left to pray for the wandering souls.
We live a life of limbo. Rulfo worked on this, his only novel, over some time having written much then lifted an angel's scythe and lessened it to its essence. This story seems to tell itself. It conveys what it wishes to say without any apparent intrusion by Rulfo. Earning his wages through non-literary means, he sold tires, had a family, wrote and listened to music at night, writing his grand novel.
As Michelangelo, he spent much time paring down the white marble to find the essence of the art within. The natural flow of the spare beauty of his words make the unnatural natural, and sets a tone and mood that places our readerly mind within the literature of dream yet laden with meaning.
Paring down must be one of the more difficult pursuits of an author. Yet when years later Rulfo placed his scalpel onto the tabletop and looked before him, tears must have flooded his eyes. This is a book that lives beyond the limits of category, precursor, movements spawned. It belongs to the few books, and please do not shoot the messenger, that when you die, and you will, you will want to know this is a book you read and experienced.
This will not be due to fame, popularity, but because it speaks of the swirled dust midair and all that cannot be said. Please read this book for your own soul. View all 29 comments. Told in fragments, the novel constantly shifts perspectives, blending past and future, living and dead, in chaotic, unpredictable ways. This makes the narrative challenging to follow, but creates a chilling, dreamlike atmosphere, and a kind of extra-temporal unification of cause and effect.
There is an implied tragedy at the heart of the novel, the nature of which is gradually revealed, though never completely. Because of its disconnected and cryptic structure, and perhaps also my own cultural distance, I felt quite detached from the narrative.
This novel would benefit from multiple readings, though I suspect that even with close study it will never fully relinquish its mystery and ambiguity. View all 3 comments. Feb 19, Kenny rated it really liked it Shelves: spenky-says-so , classics , magical-realism. Pedro Paramo was one such book. Pedro Paramo may also be the scariest ghost story ever written. Author Juan Rulfo's extraordinarily powerful novel, Pedro Paramo, captures the crux of life in rural Mexico during the last years of the 19th century, and the beginning of the 20th, like no other work of fiction.
Here, the author vividly portrays the radical social and economic changes which spurred the dramatic migration from ranches and villages to the urban slums, where they could no longer live off the land, nor find work.
Ghost towns mark the places where many had once flourished. Pedro Paramo, the son of a failing landowner, was consumed with love for Susana San Juan. This intense passion lasted a lifetime. Eventually, Pedro's aging father and family died, and Susana moved away. Alone and lonely, he assumed control of the estate and unscrupulously did whatever he had to, fair and foul, to amass a fortune and build his empire. He married the heiress Dolores Preciado, took possession of her land and wealth, and sent her to live an isolated existence with her sister.
His ranch, in Comala, the Media Luna, expanded with great success at the expense of others. JavaScript seems to be disabled in your browser. For the best experience on our site, be sure to turn on Javascript in your browser.
If you thought your town was boring in the summertime, you should be glad you never got sent to Comala for summer vacation. It's also freaking hot : Its name comes from the word comal, which is a flat pan used to heat tortillas.
Even though most of the scenes seem abstract and ghostly, they definitely take place in Mexico— Comala is a real place. The novel contains a bunch of references to foods and plants that are particular to the region.
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