The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Pedro Paramo, by Juan Rulfo, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden
reviewed by Laird Hunt

Juan Rulfo. Pedro Paramo. Trans. Margaret Sayers Peden. Photos Josephine Sacabo. Univ. of Texas Press, 2002. 161 pp. $35.00.

This handsome reissue of Juan Rulfo’s classic Pedro Paramo, occasioned by the series of Josephine Sacabo photographs that appear here alongside the text that inspired them, should serve as an opportunity for readers to (re)discover a work that, while retaining every ampoule of its extraordinary power, seems to have fallen a little off the American radar screen. First published in Mexico in 1955, Pedro Paramo begins as the story of one Juan Preciado, who in hopes of meeting his father, the novel’s eponym, travels to the village his mother fled years before, only to find a crumbling, windswept ghost-town. Welcomed by several of the village’s ghostly former inhabitants, Preciado is gradually overwhelmed by the sad voices and bits of nightmarish story that gather around him. Soon he is left behind, and the narrative turns fully to Pedro Paramo—local tyrant, empowered psychopath—and his devastating obsessions. The principal of these is Susana San Juan, Paramo’s childhood sweetheart, who despite his murderous machinations finds escape in madness. It is this side of the novel on which Josephine Sacabo’s gorgeous, dream-inflected photographs focus, serving to foreground Susana’s importance as the target of Paramo’s withering attention and as a symbol of Comala’s ruin. Rulfo’s novel, in which phantoms and visions are constituent elements of the actual, has long been acknowledged as a signal precursor (with Borges) of magic realism. It is interesting to note, and Sacabo’s photos generally help to underscore this, how unrelentingly understated Rulfo’s haunting vision was compared to the hyperbole of the practitioners who made the movement famous. Whether in the company of Sacabo’s photos, as we have it here, or in the standard Grove Press edition (which also features Margaret Sayers Peden’s elegant translation), it would be hard to recommend a work more highly.