Deserted villages of rural Mexico, where images and memories of the past linger like unquiet ghosts, haunted the imaginations of two artists—writer Juan Rulfo and photographer Josephine Sacabo. In one such village of the mind, Comala, Rulfo set his classic novel Pedro Páramo, a dream-like tale that intertwines a man's quest to find his lost father and reclaim his patrimony with the father's obsessive love for a woman who will not be possessed—Susana San Juan. Recognizing that "Rulfo was describing a world I already knew" and feeling "a very personal response, particularly to Susana San Juan and her dilemma," Josephine Sacabo used Rulfo's novel as the starting point for a series of evocative photographs she calls "The Unreachable World of Susana San Juan: Homage to Juan Rulfo."

This volume brings together Rulfo's novel and Sacabo's photographs to offer a dual artistic vision of the same unforgettable story. Margaret Sayers Peden's superb translation renders the novel as poetic and mysterious in English as it is in Spanish. Josephine Sacabo's photographs tell, in her words, "the story of a woman forced to take refuge in madness as a means of protecting her inner world from the ravages of the forces around her: a cruel and tyrannical patriarchy, a church that offers no redemption, the senseless violence of revolution, death itself."

In this 1955 Mexican novella, a young man, Juan Preciado, promises his dying mother that he will find his father, the Pedro Páramo of the title, and claim his birthright. Juan has no independent memories of his father. His mother fled her abusive and loveless marriage shortly after Juan's birth and raised him by herself in a city far away from his father's ranch.

After burying his mother, Juan sets off for Comalá where his father's ranch is located. When he reaches his destination, he finds an eerie, nightmarish town, inhabited entirely by ghosts. Comalá is a veritable graveyard where the dead relive their intolerable memories. All of those memories revolve around Pedro Páramo, the corrupt local boss, who turned Comalá into a hell on earth.

Juan Rulfo's writing is surreal and dreamlike. This novel reads as if the main character is experiencing a nightmare. The narrative contains many abrupt shifts in time and frame of reference. These rapid shifts are disorienting, and greatly enhance the novel's disturbing effect. There is one memorable passage, where Juan is wandering the deserted streets and houses of Comalá, when suddenly the whole town fills up with water and Juan experiences the sensations of drowning. I could swear that passage is right out of one of my own nightmares.

This book is far more than a ghost story. Like Toni Morrison's Beloved, Pedro Páramo is a social allegory in the form of a ghost story. The novel is filled with symbols and double-meanings. For example, Páramo means wasteland in Spanish (in fact, the Mexican edition of T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland is titled El Páramo). Juan Preciado is on a quest for his legacy. Instead, he finds a hellish wasteland, populated by ghosts. The novel is a social allegory of mid-twentieth century Mexico. From 1910 through the 1940s, Mexican society endured civil unrest, a revolutionary war, the anti-clerical purges of the Porfirio Diaz dictatorship and increased urbanization. An urban Mexican,seeking his roots, finds a bleak legacy of war, rampant poverty, destroyed haciendas and disbanded monasteries. Author Juan Rulfo was born to an upper class Mexican family. By the end of the Mexican Revolution, Rulfo's parents were dead and Rulfo himself was in an orphanage. Rulfo experienced firsthand the losses symbolically portrayed in his only novel, Pedro Páramo.

Although this short novel is difficult to follow, it contains some of the most surreal and imaginative writing I've ever read. Margaret Sayers Peden's English translation keeps all of the beauty, imagery, symbolism and wordplay intact. The book is both remarkably beautiful and remarkably disturbing. I recommend reading it through once and then skimming through it a second time in order to put it into context and perspective. This novel is particularly worthwhile for readers with a Spanish language background and an interest in Latin America.

Pedro Páramo is a beautifully written novel, in Spanish. In Spanish, the narration of Juan Preciado is lyrical, stark, simple and engaging. This translation makes the narrative sound like a female voice, and American, and there are mistakes in it that are unforgiveable. It lacks the hypnotic lyricism of the original. One leaves this translation with the thought that the translator neither understood Spanish well enough to do justice to the original, which is a masterpiece, nor could she write well enough in English to have attempted it. Translation is an art, but the translator should be like the lighting director in a theatre, someone you don't see but whose work makes magic.

This is a translation that some of us used in my senior year Survey of Latin American Literature class. Granted, as Spanish majors and minors, we should have been reading in the original. Where translations are most useful is getting around colloquial turns of phrase that leave practitioners of castellano a little dogged.

It is a good translation, mind you - Peden does an excellent job working out the phrases, something that is helpful in surrealistic prose. I just much much much prefer to read something in the original - you lose a great deal in the translation by putting up a barrier between the author's mind and your own.

The narrative can be confounding if you're expecting a straightforward plot - rather, there are two narratives, interwoven, and the order of the vignettes has more to do with character development than with chronology. One tale is of the son - and takes place somewhere between his quietly seething sense of abandonment and his abysmal personal hell. The other is of the father, and recounts his wicked life. A páramo is a local colloquialism for an empty, frozen mountaintop - a little symbolism that describes the inner life of the father quite well.

This is not a "what happens" book so much as an "about" book - and indeed the facts of the story are up to some speculation. It is up to the reader to determine whether the narrator, Juan, truly succumbs to the ceaseless dead around him and joins them, whether he is in his personal torment but remains alive, or whether he is already dead and returns to Comala, "a la mera boca del infierno" - at the very mouth of Hell. It is also up to the reader to determine whether Pedro's love for Dolores Preciado (literally "precious wounds" - oh, symbolism!) is more possession than passion.

The surrealism is one of the reasons this book remains on my shelf (supplanted by a Spanish-only edition), next to Borges and Vallejo.

I read the original version of it in Spanish, from what I have found so far from research, most translations of this book are pretty bad. There are lots of allegories and historical backgrounds in there, one cannot disregard all the content just because it seems confusing.
And to get any award for something, a book has to go through lots of consideration. If the book was really such a horrible book do you think the judges of the award would risk their reputation supporting a "bad" book?
I guess if you are fluent in Spanish I strongly suggest reading it in Spanish, or if you are a Latin American History major or Mexican history. This is a breath of fresh air, the book breaks all conventional narratives. I personally love "Continuidad de los parques" of Julio Cortazar. So if you like him you will definitely find this book a good read.

I finished the book, and had little feeling on it. So I read
a literature review, and found out that I did see the writing
techniques that were enthusiastically appraised. Yes, the
book might be full of writing techniques, but I am not
touched.