You should read Pedro Páramo twice

And then maybe watch the Netflix version

A Mexican Vaquero. Frederic Remington. 1890. Art Institute of Chicago. Public domain.

The Book:
Pedro Páramo
By Juan Rulfo
New translation by Douglas J. Weatherford
Grove Press
First published in 1955

The Talk:

My expectations for Pedro Páramo were incredibly high. The blurbs on the front and back of the book include Jorge Luis Borges (“One of the best novels in Hispanic literature, and in literature as a whole”), Carlos Fuentes (“The essential Mexican novel, unsurpassed and unsurpassable”), and Susan Sontag (“One of the masterpieces of twentieth-century world literature”). The book also opens with a generous foreword by Gabriel García Márquez, who credits the novel with giving him his voice as a novelist. He writes:

I still hadn’t escaped my bedazzlement when someone told Carlos Velo that I could recite from memory whole passages of Pedro Páramo. The truth went even further: I could recite the entire book front to back and vice versa without a single appreciable error…

I do not know if any book could live up to such hype, especially in translation. But I did enjoy the experience, and I will be thinking about this novel for a long time.

The murmur of life

Juan Rulfo’s 1955 novel tells the story of Juan Preciado going in search of his father in the deserted ghost town of Comala (presumably in Jalisco, Mexico) after promising his dying mother he would. The opening of the story could imply that the main narrator of the story is imagining or dreaming all the events of the story, though eventually it doesn’t matter what really happened.

I never thought I’d keep my promise. Until recently when I began to imagine all kinds of possibilities and allowed my fantasies to run free. And that’s how a whole new world started swirling around in my head, a world built on expectations I had for that man named Pedro Paramo, my mother’s husband. That’s why I came to Comala.

At some point early on the narrator disappears and the rest of the book is almost entirely dialogue. (I don’t think any character’s physical features are directly described in the book. The most common image is that of a silhouetted figure in a doorway.)

Rulfo uses a variety of grammatical and stylistic tools (quotes, dashes, italics, and French quotation marks) to demark where dialogue of different characters or different scenes begin and end. But the overall effect is a kind of river of voices that flows along, outside of linear time. The idea of a “murmuring” of human voices and human souls appears throughout the story:

“I began to feel the whispering getting closer, buzzing around me like a swarm of bees, until finally I could make out a few words that were almost devoid of sound: ‘Pray to God for us.’ That’s what I heard them saying.”

The main focus on the story is the narrator’s father, Pedro Páramo, a titan of a man who rises from a tragic childhood to become a ranch king, the effective crime boss / political boss of the valley of Comala. Pedro exploits everyone and everything in his quest for power, leaving nothing behind but dried up souls.

Don’t vote for Pedro

The tragedy of the book, however, are the ways in which both the wicked and innocent feed into and support Pedro’s satanic rise. Some are attracted to him, some think they can profit from him, some are just obedient, gullible, or stupid.

The town priest is the one character who knows all the town’s secrets, having heard private confessions for years, and he is crushed by his own conscience, knowing all but having failed to protect his flock. Pedro is ultimately responsible for the evil in the town, but the guilt also falls on everyone who privately gave in or assisted him each step along the way.

The life and existence of Comala is astonishingly beautiful and, at the same time, full of sin. Juan’s mother describes Comala:

“You’ll find my sanctuary there. The place I most loved. Where I grew dizzy from an abundance of hopes and dreams. My town, rising from the plain. Filled with trees and leaves, like a chest where we’ve stored our memories. You’ll understand why someone there might want to live forever.”

In a different scene, two women watch the sunrise:

—Is it true that the night is full of sin, Justina?

—Yes, Susana.

—For certain it’s true?

—It must be, Susana.

—And what do think life is, Justina, if not sin?

You should read Pedro Páramo twice. This is OK, because the novel is only 120 pages long. The first time I read it through, I spent most of the time trying to figure out who was who and who was talking. This is part of the pleasure of the book.

However, on the second readthrough, everything clicks together, and it’s a whole different experience. Nearly every sentence becomes loaded with deeper meaning. For example, in a scene near the beginning of the book, the child Pedro finds a peso lying around and takes it (steals it?). He thinks to himself, “Now I’ve got enough money for whatever I want.” Once you know the rest of the story, that sentence completely captures his character, foreshadows his whole life, and expresses the deep irony that he will never be satisfied in his desire for money.

We are mud

The story blurs between historical realism, a kind of mythological-symbolic storytelling, and magical realism. The main story is set before, during, and after the Mexican Revolution. The revolution parts reminded me a lot of Mariano Azuela’s Underdogs, in which the ideology and ideals of the revolution are a distant second to raising hell. One of the revolutionaries is asked what they are up to:

“Just wait a bit, till we get instructions, then we’ll let you know what our cause is.”

The mythological-symbolic parts of the story suggest that the story is not just a historical one but the story of all time, all humanity, all existence. Comala is described as sitting “on the burning embers of the earth, at the very mouth of Hell.” And heaven is in the sky above the town.

There’s wind, and sun, and clouds. Above us a blue sky and beyond that perhaps there’s singing, maybe in voices sweeter than our own… In a word, there’s hope. There’s hope for us, a hope set against our suffering.

Near the middle of the book the narrator meets a brother and sister who live as husband and wife, walk around naked all the time, and stay inside their house out of shame. It was only on the second reading that I realized (I think?) that they are Adam and Eve. The sister confesses:

“I tried telling him that life had brought us together, had cornered us and forced us into each other’s arms. We felt so alone here, being the only one’s around. And somehow, we needed to populate the town.”

Dirt, water, and air are also ever-present images throughout the book. Water comes from Heaven (liquified clouds) and mixes with dirt to make mud. Humans are made of mud, a mixture of heaven and earth. Similarly, air comes from Heaven. There is, the book suggests, more air in Heaven. After the end of the world, the end of the story, the end of don Pedro, the water and the air return to heaven, and all that is left of Comala is dry dirt and a suffocating lack of air.

Suddenly his heart stopped, and it seemed as if time as well had come to an end. And the breath of life with it.

I place the magical realism parts as something different than the mythical parts. It’s when the story swerves from realistic narrative logic to something almost absurd or fanciful, while not being recognizably symbolic. I leave these surprises for the reader because they defy interpretation and are more fun to stumble into.

The Netflix adaptation

I didn’t realize until after I read Pedro Páramo that Netflix released an adaptation of the book in 2024. (The novel has been adapted to film before, in 1967, 1977, and 1981.) So I watched it after reading the book.

It hews very close to the book, sometimes down to very small details. For example, in one scene someone turns their head exactly when they turn their head in the book. There are a few subtexts and suggestions made in the film that I didn’t pick up in the book, but they seemed plausible inferences. Some parts of the movie were presented like horror, though I didn’t think of those same scenes in the book as horror-like.

I’m not sure what I want out of film adaptations. I don’t think I’ve ever wanted a film adaptation of a book I’ve read. I also don’t think there needs to be perfect congruence between the film and the book for the film to be good.

I suppose I think that each artform is the best at something, and that the “highest” version of each artform is when it’s doing what it alone does best. Novels contain dialogue, description, figurative language, narration, and stream of consciousness. However,

• Plays do dialogue best.

• Movies, through image and sound, describe things best.

• Poetry is figurative language pushed to the limit.

• Storytelling does narration best.

• Novels do inner monologue / stream of consciousness best.

A novel can do something effortlessly that other media can’t. It can string together sentences, in which each sentence stands on it own as a thought and connects to the sentence before and after it, with the connections being the associative, meandering mind. All my favorite parts of books like Lonesome Dove or Dune¹, which have been famously adapted to the screen, are the invisible stuff—the thoughts of the characters, which don’t show up in film, or at least only do so in a kind of shoehorned, forced way, either as voiceover narration or dialogue.

All that to say, movie adaptations always disappoint me as adaptations—because they muck up all the best parts of books. (I feel like the Lord of the Rings books are about the pleasure of reading. Movies are necessarily not reading a book and thus necessarily miss the heart of the books no matter what.)

In the same way, books are not super-great at the visual. They can make something vivid, but then they introduce some detail, and you have to rework the picture in your head to make it make sense. And, more often than not, the most pleasing and most memorable descriptions in fiction are the simplest. (Flannery O’Connor used the “three details and gtfo” rule of thumb.)

So what I liked about the Pedro Páramo movie, that the book couldn’t really show well, were all the facial reactions of the characters during the dialogue. Also the architecture and the costumes, which expressed the changing of time, as well as the roles and class distinctions of characters. The status difference between Indians and white people, and all the variations across the spectrum, are easier to distinguish and shine a new light on the dialogue from the book. Because it’s not my native culture, all these setting details were interesting discoveries to me.

At the same time, the style of the movie made things more coherent or legible than the book. As I said before, the book flows along like a river of voices, like a dream. I feel like the movie wanted to make sure that I didn’t miss the connections or plot points of the story. This is kind of what I disliked about the 1980s Lonesome Dove miniseries after reading the book; the book is a kind of wonderous dreamy blur while the miniseries is focused on hitting all the marks. Movies can create that feeling, but maybe not Hollywood ones.

Related:

The hurricane of history

Is Allende's Zorro the hero we need?

Did the Spanish Conquest happen?

Heat Is Claiming Mexico’s Young People² (Inside Climate News, 1/1/25)

1. Or say Virginia Woolf or Faulkner if that’s your thing

2. “Mexico was a key focus for the research not only because it has one of the best public databases on heat-related deaths, but also because it’s one of the few countries where wet-bulb temperatures have reached nearly 95°F (35°C)—the maximum the human body can survive.” (emphasis mine)