BLURBS FROM BORGES, García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Susan Sontag...how is it I have not already read this? Well, now I have, and it's easy to see why it has the reputation it does. First published in 1955, it predates the famous Boom by a decade or so, but it has the earmarks of that renaissance: the grit of actuality somehow combined with the otherness of a dream, the atmosphere of a myth grounded firmly in history.
The unnamed narrator is looking for his father, Pedro Páramo, who like the senior Hamlet, is dead but seems to be still in charge. We get glimpses of moments in his rise from hardscrabble urchin to village boss as the narrator collects information. Páramo's rise coincides with the era of Porfirio Diaz, and there are hints that the Mexican Revolution has a hand in his toppling, but the prevailing hallucinatory, even supernatural atmosphere kept me from being altogether certain about any detail.
I read most of this short book (120-some pages in this new translation published in 2023) one night when I couldn't get to sleep, which turned out to be ideal circumstances in which to read it. As I read, the sun felt hot, the ground underfoot hard, but I was moving in a ghost world, vivid but intangible, the tale unrolling with the inevitability of a dream. An eerie, one of a kind fiction.
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