Pedro Paramo

This short novel by Mexican writer Juan Rulfo greatly influenced the magical realism greats such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jorge Louis Borges. This novel is less of a juxtaposition between the surreal and the mundane, as in classic magical realism, but is more full of fragmented visions, hallucinations, and a complete breakdown of the senses.

A cacophony of voices is scattered through this book like dried leaves on the wind. The people are all dead. They whisper their stories in the first person whenever someone meets them on the street, or whenever the rain wakes them in their graves. The pitter-patter sounds like footsteps above them.

Juan Preciado, the main protagonist, journeys to Comala on his mother's deathbed request the he find his father, Pedro Paramo. Many people point the way, and senoras welcome him to their homes, give him dinner and a place to sleep. He meets others who marvel how he came into these houses, boarded up for decades, the senoras dead for years. Wouldn't you know it, but these messengers are all dead, too.

Later Juan dies of fear and the cold, though the heat of his experiences is suffocating. He wakes with Dorotea after they are buried together. They hear the whispers of the neighbors in their graves, moaning their stories whenever the damp wakes them.

Pedro Paramo takes all of the land. He funds the revolution then revokes his support to align with the winning party. He murders anyone who bothers him and sleeps with all the young women, as if they belonged to him, too. He claims to love Susana San Juan, who is crazy and dying from her tortured daydreams and sorrow over the death of her first husband. The priest comes to forgive her sins, though he's not sure she has any. He is already dead. When Susana finally dies, Pedro crosses his arms and refuses to work. His fields dry up and the entire town dies of hunger, becoming the ghost town that Juan finds later.

Instead of weaving a continuous or understandable plot, beautiful and clear descriptions are lost between dreams, memories, and fears of purgatory. The dead are not necessarily stuck, just given time and space somehow to piece together understanding of their lives and what has happened to them since.