For years whenever someone asked me for my favorite book I went with a classic, Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. But it wasn’t until I read Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo
Pedro Paramo tracks the story of a young man named Juan Preciado as he travels to the small Mexican town of Comala in search of Pedro Paramo, his supposed father. As Juan travels through Comala he meets the people of the town, and in a compelling depiction of rural Mexico, discovers the story of his father. Pedro was once the golden boy of the town until disaster struck. Rulfo uses the organization of the book itself to relay those stories, giving you little pieces at a time, and asking you to put together the image of the town like a jigsaw puzzle. Through dissected dialogue and broken images of Comala, Rulfo paints a graphic picture of both Mexico in the late nineteenth-early twentieth century and the deserted ghost towns that inhabit the countryside.
What I found to be most compelling though was Rulfo’s depiction of faith. Rulfo does not hesitate to bring the reader into a world of suspicion and ritual that permeates the town of Comala, impacting the status of every person Juan encounters. For those of us needing an escape from the reality of the everyday, Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo will draw you into a world of mysticism, faith, suspicion and excellent storytelling.
Alex Smith is an intern at Guernica.
