A comment on “Pedro Paramo”- by Juan Rulfo (1917-1986)

 

A  masterpiece fiction that covers the quest of a man for his father, Pedro Paramo, whom he had not seen at all, but following his mother`s wish to go and search after him. After reading the novel & watched the film adaptation of Carlos Velo’s film, Pedro Paramo, in 1967; I realised a great match between Conrad’s ” Heart of Darkness” & Pedro Paramo in their intense poetic narrative, the different layers of connotations of the imagery  employed, and the huge ramifications of their influence on the literary circles of the twentieth century writers. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who wrote the introduction to the english translation copy recognized the deep effect it had on him to start writing  “One Hundred Years of Solitude”.  Marques wrote:”I could recite the entire book front to back and vice versa without a single appreciable error, I could tell you on which page of my edition each scene could be found, and there wasn’t a single aspect of its characters’ personalities which I wasn’t deeply familier with”- P. x in the forward-.   When he historical and the mythical merge together, masterpieces are the results of such a genre that dominated Latin America’s Hispanic  literature for decades after this innovation.  Marquez was absolute right when hw wrote: “Perdro Paramo is a poetic work of the highest order….it is impossible to be entirely sure where the line between the living and the dead is drawn” . The novel  is “as great and ….enduring, as those of Sophocles” P. xiii 

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