Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo

Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo

Overview: A magical realism story about a man trying to find his father and hearing the tale through the ghosts of the town his father once controlled, Pedro Páramo is the quintessential Mexican novel. It was the only novel ever written by Juan Rulfo, who also published one excellent collection of short stories, The Burning Plain (El Llano en Llamas).

As one enters Juan Rulfo's legendary novel, one follows a dusty road to a town of death.Time shifts from one consciousness to another in a hypnotic flow of dreams, desires, and memories, a world of ghosts dominated by the figure of Pedro Páramo - lover, overlord, murderer. Rulfo's extraordinary mix of sensory images, violent passions and unfathomable mysteries has been a profound influence on a whole generation of Latin American writers including Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. To read Pedro Páramo today is as overwhelming an experience as when it was first published in Mexico nearly fifty years ago.

From Wikipedia:
Gabriel García Márquez has said that he felt blocked as a novelist after writing his first four books and that it was only his life-changing discovery of Pedro Páramo in 1961 that opened his way to the composition of his masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Moreover, Marquez claimed that he "could recite the whole book, forwards and backwards." Jorge Luis Borges considered Pedro Páramo to be one of the greatest texts written in any language.