Pedro Páramo (Wittliff Gallery Series) - Hardcover

Juan Rulfo; Josephine Sacabo; Margaret Sayers Peden

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0292771215 ISBN 13: 9780292771215

Publisher: University of Texas Press, 2002

Synopsis

Winner, Fred Whitehead Award for the Best Design of a Trade Book from Texas Institute of Letters
Western Books Exhibition Selection, Rounce & Coffin Club, 2003

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."

About this title

From the Publisher

A classic Mexican literary novel. Since its publication in 1955, Juan Rulfo's first effort has been translated into many languages and has gone through many editions. This one is the only one revised and edited by the Juan Rulfo Foundation and should be considered the definitive edition.

From the Inside Flap

A masterpiece of the surreal, this stunning novel from Mexico depicts a man's strange quest for his heritage. Beseeched by his dying mother to locate his father, Pedro Paramo, whom they fled from years ago, Juan Preciado sets out for Comala. Comala is a town alive with whispers and shadows--a place seemingly populated only by memory and hallucinations. Built on the tyranny of the Paramo family, its barren and broken-down streets echo the voices of tormented spirits sharing the secrets of the past.

First published to both critical and popular acclaim in 1955, Pedro Paramo represented a distinct break with earlier, largely "realist" novels from Latin America. Rulfo's entrancing mixture of vivid sensory images, violent passions, and inexplicable sorcery--a style that has come to be known as "magical realism"--has exerted a profound influence on subsequent Latin American writers, from Jose Donoso and Carlos Fuentes to Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

"Among contemporary writers in Mexico today Juan Rulfo is expected to rank among the immortals."--Selden Rodman, The New York Times Book Review

"A strange, brooding novel.... Great immediacy, power, and beauty."--The Washington Post

"A powerful fascination...vivid and haunting; the style is a triumph."--New York Herald Tribune

Juan Rulfo (1918-1986) was born in Sayula, in the state of Jalisco, Mexico. Although he was not a prolific writer and completed only one collection of short stories, The Burning Plain (1953), one novel, Pedro Paramo, and several screenplays, these works established him as a major literary figure in Latin America. He influenced both a number of later Latin American writers as well as being a source of inspiration, in his criticism of Mexico's semi-feudal structures, to the student revolutionaries of the late 1960s. These contributions to literature were recognized in 1970 when he was awarded Mexico's National Prize for Literature. As well, in 1980 he was elected to the Mexican Academy of Language and in 1985 he was awarded the Premio Cervantes by Spain. Rulfo died in 1986 of a heart attack.

Margaret Sayers Peden is Professor Emerita of Spanish at the University of Missouri. She has translated numerous works from the Spanish to great acclaim, including The Old Gringo by Carlos Fuentes, The Stories of Eva Luna by Isabel Allende, and Elemental Odes by Pablo Neruda.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0292771215
• ISBN 13: 9780292771215
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 164