Pedro Paramo. (1955)

The story started out straight-forward enough: Following his mother's death the narrator travels to his mother's native Mexican village to meet the father he never knew. Along the way he encounters and interacts with a number of townsfolk who he begins to suspect may not actually be alive. That's about as far as I was able to follow the story — after that it felt like merely a series of individual characters entering the narrative just long enough to have a conversation or two about their past or the Páramo family, and then exiting, never to be heard from again. And I think most of them were ghosts? I'll be honest, I couldn't make heads or tails of 90% of the book. Magical realism is probably my least favorite literary style. I selected this title to fulfill the Read Harder category "a horror novel by a BIPOC author," so I wish I had paid more attention to the description. I couldn't be finished fast enough. ( )

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First of all, this picture might be handy in order to understand the relationships between characters:
http://p.calameoassets.com/140305001754-9f6b5062923f70c87febbc5b57f43e85/p1.jpg
I've never read such a mixed up tale. They say "One hundred years of solitude" of Gabriel Garcia Marquez is also a bit messy because of too many characters. Since Marquez is influenced by Juan Rulfo, the author of "Pedro Paramo", this should be expected. The story seems inconsistent at many parts. I would compare this novel to a series of dreams you might had during a bad night's sleep, all incomplete, mixed-up. ( )

Hay algo que me desencanta bastante, siempre en estos libros se describe el mismo pueblo, el mismo jefe de bando, la misma pobreza... yo se que Latinoamérica tiene estas cosas, pero ¿no hay nada más? ¿Nada más que fantasmas y miseria? Esa no es mi experiencia y me molesta leer autores latinoamericanos que siempre crean la misma imagen (o al menos así se siente para mí).
Creo que esa es la razón por la que no se lleva las 5⭐.
La historia en sí me gustó, Me gusta como presenta la historia con el hijo perdido volviendo a casa. Me gusta explorar la historia de Pedro y sus tierras a través de sus fantasmas. Creo que no había leído algo así antes. ( )

I'm not really a big fan of magical realism, and in general I don't like the Latin American literature that is heavily steeped in it. So I started this iconic novel with some skepticism. The Mexican Juan Rulfo published it in 1955, and it is generally seen as the real start of Latin American literature. The novel begins fairly conventionally, with the story of a young man who travels to the village of his presumed father, Pedro Paramo. But what follows is a succession of strange, hallucinatory scenes, with shadowy characters in what appears to be a ghost town, a village where time and space intertwine, and death is omnipresent. Primal father Pedro Parama is about the only connecting element, a mafia figure who rules over life and death without much scruple, but who appears to have a touching soft spot for a woman who has been living in seclusion in the dark for years. In other words, this novel is a very disorienting reading experience, intriguing and frustrating at the same time. The only recent point of comparison seems to me to be 'Lincoln in the Bardo', by George Saunders (2017). But in comparison, Rulfo certainly places more tragic, existential, accents. ( )