Review
Pedro Páramo review – Mexican magic realism is full of time slippages and perspective shifts
Adapted from Juan Rulfo’s influential novel, Rodrigo Prieto’s fractured drama of a son’s return home is confusing but powerful
Phil Hoad
Showing posts with label Juan Rulfo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Juan Rulfo. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 6, 2024
Netflix adapts Pedro Páramo
Netflix adapts Pedro Páramo, the great Mexican novel that inspired Márquez
New film of Juan Rulfo’s revered novel, considered founding text of magic realism, is first film adaptation in half a century
Thomas Graham in Mexico CityTuesday 5 November 2024
“I came to Comala because I was told that my father lived here, a certain Pedro Páramo.”
Netflix adapts Pedro Páramo, the great Mexican novel that inspired Márquez
New film of Juan Rulfo’s revered novel, considered founding text of magic realism, is first film adaptation in half a century
Thursday, December 16, 2021
Books that changed the face of fiction / Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo
Books that changed the face of fiction: Pedro Páramo
BOOKS & POETRY
Mexican writer Juan Rulfo’s dark fable Pedro Páramo ignores boundaries between the living and the dead – but is more than just a ghost story. It is, writes Stephen Orr, a book that created a genre.
Stephen Orr
Wednesday, January 30, 2019
Rulfo was the great Mexican and, later, by extension, Latin American writer. He was born in Apulco in 1917 at a time of radical change and experimentation in literature (Edgar Rice Burroughs was still publishing Tarzan novels, and Conrad, The Shadow Line, but meanwhile, Ford Madox Ford had just produced The Good Soldier and Joyce was busy at work on Ulysses).
Tuesday, October 5, 2021
Juan Rulfo / Pedro Páramo / Reviews
Pedro Paramo
by Juan Rulfo
Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo was a profound influence on Márquez, and in Margaret Sayers' new translation his prose is limpid and magical
Pedro Paramo
Juan Rulfo
Serpent's Tail £6.99, pp122
'I came to Comala because I had been told that my father, a man named Pedro Paramo, lived there. It was my mother who told me. And I promised her that after she died I would go see him...' If these opening sentences sound eerily reminiscent of Gabriel García Márquez, that's not surprising: Márquez has cited this extraordinary short novel - a classic of Spanish literature - as the book that most profoundly influenced his early years. Mario Vargas Llosa and Carlos Fuentes also acknowledge their debt.
Francisco Goldman on Juan Rulfo
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| Juan Rulfo |
Francisco Goldman on Juan Rulfo
BIOGRAPHY
Pedro Páramo is the most beautiful modern novel in Spanish—by modern I mean everything written from Don Quixote to today. It is also one of the most original, one of the most mesmerizing and strange. Juan Rulfo’s entire published literary output amounted to Pedro Páramo and one equally slender, and also classic, collection of short stories, El llano el llantas. That doesn’t seem all that surprising, because Pedro Páramo seems almost too unprecedented and singular. What would you do if, after writing a novel this uncompromisingly original and perfect—considering the role of luck along with everything else in this kind of perfection—you could never again match it? Gabriel García Márquez, living in Mexico, before he wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude, was so beguiled by Pedro Páramo that he memorized it. He could recite the whole book out loud! As if maybe then the book might begin to yield its secrets—its formal secrets, certainly, for there had never before been, I believe, a novel structured anything like this one. And yet it seems so effortlessly, naturally, seamlessly, and inevitably narrated. People talk about novels sculpting time in a new way, or defeating or subverting time, or of novels creating a world apart, in somehow autonomous relation to our usual reality: a life all their own, which is also ours. Pedro Páramo seems to do all of that. Yet its voices are so human they can easily seem even more human than those we hear ever day. And the “soul” of this book gets inside you and haunts you.
Juan Rulfo by Yuri Herrera
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| Juan Rulfo |
On the Centenary of a Great Mexican Writer
Juan Rulfo
BIOGRAPHY
by Yuri Herrera
May 17, 2017
The human element is a particle lost in the depths of time, in Rulfo’s work. It contains more than what is apparent: at every given moment, we carry around the weight of our origins and the weight of our mistakes. Perhaps that is why Rulfo’s main ideas deal with where we came from, what kind of fortune has been dealt to us, and how we can attempt to take revenge on all that.
Monday, October 4, 2021
Juan Rulfo by Dylan Brennan
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| Juan Rulfo |
On the Centenary of a Great Mexican Writer
Juan Rulfo
BIOGRAPHY
by Dylan Brennan
May 17, 2017
There is an exquisite sense of tension in the stories and novels of Juan Rulfo. The earthly and the ghostly are interwoven throughout. The first Rulfo story I read was “Talpa” and I’ve been hooked ever since. “Talpa” tells the story of a pilgrimage undertaken by a dying man, his wife, and his brother (the latter two are carrying on an illicit affair). Tanilo embarks upon a doomed pilgrimage in the hope that the Virgin of Talpa can stop his physical suffering. While alive he is riddled with sores and beset on all sides by the stench of death. While dead his presence seems to interpose itself between his wife and brother. In this way, the barrier between worlds begins to fade. A fragmented, non-linear chronology completes the effect. After this introduction, it was not long until I got round to reading Pedro Páramo, Rulfo’s first novel. Without wanting to give too much away to any uninitiated readers, in this masterfully constructed text, the real and the phantasmagorical, the substantial and the ethereal, all jostle for prominence throughout, leading to a startling revelation concerning the nature of both narrator and characters. I remember exactly where I was when I read it for the first time. I suspect most readers of Pedro Páramo feel the same way.
Juan Rulfo by Guadalupe Nettel
On the Centenary of a Great Mexican Writer
Juan Rulfo
BIOGRAPHY
by Guadalupe Nettel
May 17, 2017
I first encountered The Plain in Flames when I was not yet fourteen, a teenager. At the time I was a great fan of fantastic literature. I had already read Poe, Stevenson, Huxley, and I was devouring Kafka. Our Spanish teacher had assigned Rulfo at the beginning of the school year. But I had decided to postpone the read as long as I could, as I was quite wary of school assignments and preferred to devote myself to books which I considered more interesting. One morning, however, our teacher had announced that some of our parents had complained of its immorality and demanded that the book be banned. The Plain in Flames had suddenly turned into a prohibited read—one that, for that very reason, I absolutely had to get my teeth into. That day, as soon as I got home, I ran straight to my bedroom and read “Macario,” the short story which had caused much of the fuss at school. It was a first-person account of a country boy’s life in which, with complete nonchalance, were recounted the circumstances of his abandonment and the semi-erotic relationship he had developed with his nanny, in whose bosom he would frolic every night. I couldn’t put the book down till I finished it.
Juan Rulfo by Carmen Boullosa
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| Juan Rulfo |
On the Centenary of a Great Mexican Writer
Juan Rulfo
BIOGRAPHY
By Carmen Boullosa
May 17, 2017
I first read Juan Rulfo when I was 15, and attending high school. By then I had already started fashioning my personal pantheon of writers. Emily Brönte was my first pick—she was queen of the gods. I added others (greedily, speedily) to my cult—Cortázar, Arreola, Borges, Bioy Casares, and Silvina Ocampo with their The Book of Fantasy (anthology of fantastic literature). Then Onetti;,Lezama Lima, Octavio Paz, Rosario Castellanos. Then Cervantes, Lope de Vega and, on the top shelf, Quevedo, who made me laugh to tears.
In Praise of Juan Rulfo / On the Centenary of a Great Mexican Writer
In Praise of Juan Rulfo:
On the Centenary of a Great Mexican Writer
May 17, 2017
Born in the Mexican state of Jalisco, a region acutely affected by the violence of the Mexican Revolution, Juan Rulfo (1917-1986) was an unlikely candidate to become one of his nation’s most significant writers of fiction. At six he witnessed his father’s body laid out in the family home after an assassin’s bullet took his life. He was only ten and living in a boarding school in Guadalajara when he received the delayed news that his mother had died—perhaps out of sadness—and had already been placed in the ground. If Rulfo’s familial circumstances were truncated, his academic career fared little better. He entered and abandoned a seminary, was unable to register at the university, and took a short-lived job that he despised as a foreman at one of tire-giant Goodrich-Euzkadi’s production factories. Through it all, Rulfo was nurturing a creative spirit that would burst onto the literary scene when he published a collection of short stories (The Plain in Flames, 1953) and a novel (Pedro Páramo, 1955) that would help usher in the so-called boom of Latin American literature that included Nobel laureates Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia) and Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru).
Sunday, October 3, 2021
They Have Given Us The Land By Juan Rulfo
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| Photo by Juan Rulfo |
They Have Given Us The Land
by Juan Rulfo
Translated by IIan Stavans with Harold Augenbraum
Juan Rulfo / Nos han dado la tierra
Juan Rulfo / It´s Because We're So Poor
Juan Rulfo / No Dogs Bark
After walking for so many hours without coming upon even the shadow of a tree, not even the seed of a tree, not even a root of anything, you can hear dogs barking.
You might sometimes think, in the middle of this edgeless road, that there would be nothing after it; that you would find nothing on the other side, at the end of this plain split with cracks and dried arroyos. But yes, there’s something. There’s a village. You can hear the dogs barking and feel the smoke in the air, and relish the smell of people as if it were a hope. But the village is still far away. It’s the wind that brings it closer. We’ve been walking since dawn. Right now it’s around four in the afternoon. Someone looks up at the sky, stretches his eyes toward where the sun is hanging, and says:
“It’s about four o’clock.”
Wednesday, August 19, 2020
Top 10 Latin American short stories
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| Jorge Luis Borges Illustration by Leib Chigrin |
Top 10 Latin American short stories
Its fiction is best known to English readers through novels, but its short stories are better. From Jorge Luis Borges to Clarice Lispector, here are some of the bestFernando Sdrigotti
Wed 22 April 2020
S
hort stories: how not to despair with the unjust way they are treated in the world of British letters? From their frequent definition in terms of what they are not – a novel – to the reluctance of risk-averse publishers when it comes to releasing one of these not-novels into the world. The latter tendency is falling out of fashion, thank God (thanks in large part to indie presses). But the hapless short-story book is still generally referred to as a “collection” in English. Call me picky, but this has always been a problematic word for me, because it masks the fact that this kind of book – if any good – is still a coherent conceptual unit: stories don’t grow spontaneously, like weed, so that writers can simply collect them. What’s wrong with calling a book of short stories “a book of short stories”?
Coming both literally and literarily from Latin America, these idiosyncrasies have always puzzled me. It is in the short story that our authors excel, and this is a hill I am willing to die on. The form is valued by readers, publishers and critics alike, cherished for its close connection to storytelling as oral tradition, and second to none in the region’s canon. And if I had to choose which books to preserve on a bookshelf of posterity I would salvage this unassuming genre and toss many an oversize novel, especially those written by otherwise excellent short-story writers.
JOLTS, my latest book of short stories, is styled in the Latin American tradition but written in English, a borrowed language – in this way I have managed to straddle both and neither worlds. This is a discomfort I cherish. This feeling of sitting somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, trying to force a dialogue between two totally different canons, and two different parts of myself, has been a constant source of inspiration. But there is always fear about what might get lost in translation. Although I have included many nods to my masters in the book, I suspect some of these could be hard to pin down for a British reader. So this is an attempt to pay explicit homage to some of the Latin American short story writers that influenced my own practice, together with others that have caught my attention in recent years. Hopefully this – incomplete – list might be a first step for any curious lover of short fiction.
Few stories better capture the power of writing than this one by Argentina’s most famous literary export. Imaginary lands and imaginary planets, forged volumes of the British Encyclopaedia and forged quotes – a Borgesian favourite – come together in this tale where fiction writes itself into reality; in which one can’t be told from the other.
2. The Llano in Flames by Juan Rulfo
Rulfo achieved world fame with his novel Pedro Páramo but his short stories are equally worthy of attention. The Llano in Flames, from the homonymous book perfectly embodies his style: economy of prose, sensorial images that in their attention to nature greatly capture the essence of rural Mexico, characters who seem to exist beyond life and death. Rulfo only published two books in his lifetime but his influence can still be felt.
A disturbing tale of perversion and revenge in which a child narrowly escapes abuse by pushing her attacker into a construction site hole. It might sound like a spoiler but this act of karmic justice is just the beginning. That this story explores adults’ capacity for wrong is clear from its opening paragraph. But are children also capable of evil? A dark but satisfying read by an Argentinian short story talent which deserves to be read more widely.
4. The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow by Gabriel García Márquez
Better known for his immortal novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, the Colombian García Márquez was also the author of outstanding short stories. In this one, a wealthy couple on their honeymoon in Europe go through a dramatic, Kafkaesque ordeal, taking the reader on a suffocating journey. Legend has it Borges said that 50 years would have sufficed for One Hundred Years of Solitude, but not one word is a word too many in this magnificent story.
5. Perfumada Noche (Scented Night) by Haroldo Conti
A beautiful ode to life, love, and death in a small town in the Province of Buenos Aires. Unlike his novel Southeaster but along with much of his work, this story remains untranslated into English. Conti was disappeared by the Argentinian military junta in 1976. Before this tragic end he gifted us in Perfumada Noche one of the most evocative opening sentences ever written: “The life of a man is a miserable draft, a handful of sorrows that fit in just a few lines.”
6. The Fifth Story by Clarice Lispector
It is nothing short of miraculous that all of Lispector’s short fiction is available in English. Choosing a single story by one of Latin America’s finest writers is a cruel exercise but a great entry point to her work is The Fifth Story, from her book The Foreign Legion. All her most interesting traits are there: a certain linguistic strangeness, the subversion of domestic space, the sadistic brutality of everyday life, and the metafictional bent that would explode in her later works.
7. Letter to a Young Lady in Paris by Julio Cortázar
Reading Cortázar’s Bestiario as a teenager was my literary “listening to the Sex Pistols” moment. I devoured the book from cover to cover and ran to my mother’s Olivetti to start churning out my own short stories. Some of these early attempts still exist in my box of memories but needless to say none of them is as good as Letter to a Young Lady in Paris, from this extraordinary book. A flat swap starts to go wrong when our hero, who writes the missive of the title, starts vomiting bunnies that proceed to destroy the flat. Sounds strange? Welcome to Cortázar’s world.
8. Las amapolas también tienen espinas (Poppies Also Have Thorns) by Pedro Lemebel
Criminally underpublished in English, Lemebel, is one of Chile’s most singular voices. Gay, mestizo, working class and communist, it would be hard to find a more unlikely survivor of the Pinochet years. His crónicas of the Santiago of the 70s, 80s, and 90s, are brutal yet endearing documents of lives lived in the margins. In this story from his La esquina es mi corazón (The Corner is My Heart) Lemebel tells a tale of desire, class and violent homophobia. And he does so endearingly, honestly, and with characteristic dark humour. Lemebel as a transvestite flâneur is an exceptional guide to the Latin American city.
9. Sky and Poplars by Margarita García Robayo
Fish Soup by the Colombian García Robayo is a remarkable recent genre-bending effort, that brings together short stories and two novellas. A deadpan beat runs through the whole book – at times you find yourself giggling at things, only to question yourself a second later whether you should really be laughing about that. Sky and Poplars is in my opinion where she best displays her craft. In it, romantic and familial unspoken tragedies meet gentrification, to portray a suffocating world of angst and alienation.
10. Towards Happy Civilisation by Samanta Schweblin
In this story from the understated Mouthful of Birds we follow the misadventures of a city-dweller stuck in a provincial train station, trying to return to the capital. The apparently simple act of boarding a train is complicated here to an absurd degree. At times Beckettian riff, at times criticism of the state of the Argentinian railways post-neoliberalism, at times commentary on the civilisation v barbarism binary behind Argentinian identity, this is a story that will unsettle and amuse in equal measure.
THE GUARDIAN
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