After his mother’s death, a man goes to a village to find out who his father was - a strange journey that will take him through the past and the afterlife.
Mexican writer Juan Rulfo’s 1955 novel Pedro Paramo is a highly regarded work but I wasn’t able to connect with it in a way that made me appreciate its supposed greatness.
The novel starts well - our protagonist is in a landscape that already feels like it belongs in a fairytale (crossroads hint at supernatural elements - ie. the devil at the crossroads) - and I was captivated by his journey into this weird town of Comala (almost a homophone for coma, another hint that things aren’t as they seem - could our main character be exploring his subconscious through a coma?).
We meet odd people, the place is bizarrely empty - and then the penny drops as we realise the entire populace of the village are all ghosts. I was intrigued to find out who Pedro Paramo was, but, after this reveal (it’s not a spoiler either as it happens very early on in the book - it’s basically the premise), things effectively stop moving, and I began to lose more interest as the novel went on until I stopped caring long before the end.
Events jump between the past and present and we learn about Pedro Paramo - he fathered lots of bastards, didn’t bother to raise them or pay any mind to their mothers, and essentially behaved like the unelected mob boss of the town. People feared him, and he was a twat. Meanwhile the ghosts try to find absolution so they can leave this purgatory and move to the next plain, be it heaven or hell.
The novel is well written - despite being over 70 years old, it’s very accessible - but, besides the title character, the rest of the cast didn’t have strong characterisation, and, couple that with no real story to speak of, it didn’t leave much of an impression on me. We see the abiding role religion and family plays in Mexican culture and little else. More than anything, I think this novel survives because of its enormous influence on Gabriel Garcia Marquez in the writing of One Hundred Years of Solitude.
I might’ve liked this better if there had been more of a story - as it is, Pedro Paramo left me indifferent and bored for much of its relatively short page count.
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