The book begins with urgency - the narrator has promised his mother on her death bed that he would visit his estranged father. He bounced around the country between different schools but never attended university, only auditing classes he worked to support himself, though he dreamed of school, and he moved from one menial job to another until he received a fellowship from the Rockefeller Institute, which allowed him to write his first book, a collection of realistic stories. Juan Rulfo, the novel’s author, was born in Apulco, Mexico in 1917, to a family of wealthy landowners but both of Rulfo’s parents died by the time he was ten, and his family’s fortunes were ruined in the Mexican Revolution. Slowly, the slim text passed itself around the world. But people who did read it shared it with their friends. Pedro Páramo is a 139-page novel that only sold about 2,000 copies in the first four years after it was published, partly due to critics’ bafflement and gleeful venom upon its release. But what is Pedro Páramo? What is all the fuss about, and why has no one ever heard of this book?

More than half a century after it was first published, Pedro Páramo has been translated into over 30 languages and has sold over a million copies in the U.S. Rulfo’s work, Márquez declared, would endure like Oedipus. In a foreword to the 1980 edition of the novel, Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez confessed that when he fell into a creative paralysis after his first five books, it was his discovery of Pedro Páramo in 1961 that inspired him to write again and compose his masterpiece, A Hundred Years of Solitude. Years later, famed Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, progenitor of the Latin American Boom and Magical Realism, claimed that Pedro Páramo was one of the greatest texts written in any language. Pedro Páramo, a short novel written by Mexican writer and photographer Juan Rulfo, was published in Mexico by Fondo de Cultura Económica in 1955.

It was the spark that lit the fire of Magical Realism.

Pedro paramo by juan rulfo