Description

NOW A MAJOR NETFLIX FILM

‘One of the masterpieces of twentieth-century world literature’ Susan Sontag

With an Introduction by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A new translation by Douglas J. Weatherford

From one of the most famous and influential Mexican writers, and the father of magical realism, this novel is a stunning masterpiece of the surreal. Juan Preciado sets out on a strange quest, bound by a promise to his dying mother. Embarking down a parched and dusty road, Juan goes to seek his father, Pedro Paramo, from whom they fled many years ago.

The ruined town of Comala is alive with whispers and shadows. Time shifts from one consciousness to another in a hypnotic flow of desires and memories, a world of ghosts dominated by the tyranny of the Paramo family. Womaniser, overlord and murderer, Juan’s notorious father retains an eternal grip over Comala. Its barren and broken-down streets echo the voices of tormented spirits sharing the secrets of the past in an extraordinary chorus of sensory images, violent passions and unfathomable mysteries.

Publisher Review

Pedro Paramo is not only one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century world literature but one of the most influential of the century's books -- Susan Sontag Rulfo's moment in the English-speaking world has finally arrived. His novel's conception is of a simplicity and profundity worthy of Greek tragedy, though another way of conveying its unique effect might be to say that it is Wuthering Heights located in Mexico and written by Kafka * Guardian * This brilliant Mexican novel, written in 1955, describes a man's search for his unknown father with the haunting clarity and strange logic of a recurrent nightmare * Esquire * A strange, brooding novel. . . . Great immediacy, power and beauty. * Washington Post * A powerful fascination . . . vivid and haunting; the style is a triumph. * New York Herald Tribune * With its dense interweaving of time, its routine interaction of the living and the dead, its surreal sense of the everyday, and with simultaneous-and harmonious-coexistence of apparently incompatible realities, this brief novel by the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo strides through unexplored territory with a sure and determined step * New York Times Book Review * No reader interested in the vitality of twentieth century Latin American fiction can afford to miss this work * Chicago Tribune * The silences yawn in Rulfo's writing. Its rhythms seem to slow time, and reality's edges fray into a strange gulf ... Pedro Paramo is like hunting for a key in a building that is collapsing around you ... one of the more remarkable journeys in literature -- Chris Power