5 Mexico – Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo, November 2013 (Score 3.78)


Please bear with me on this one. Just before we selected this novel for our book group I read “Reading like a writer” by Francine Prose, which I enjoyed very much.

Prose is a well-respected American author with fourteen novels to her credit, as well as many articles for high-level US newspapers and magazines. She has taught literature and writing for twenty years at major universities. She has won many grants and awards, and is a past president of PEN America Centre. With this background her opinions deserve serious consideration.

She discusses “Pedro Paramo” at length in “Reading like a writer”, quoting a lengthy section from the beginning, up to page 7 as far as “Pedro Paramo died a long time ago“. I have appended her comments below, followed by a few of my own.

“Reading even this brief passage you may begin to intuit one of the odd things about the novel which is that you don’t exactly know if its characters are living or dead, or if it makes any difference.

“Throughout, the twists and turns in the road keep coming as fast as they do in this section [the section she quotes in “Reading …], upsetting whatever we thought we knew about the novel’s premise or its characters, causing us to rethink such basic questions as whether the inhabitants of Comala are fantasies or real, presences or memories. Saying this risks making the novel sound like a work of science fiction or magic realism, which it is not.

“It is a work of art, and there is nothing else like it”.

While I found Prose’s arguments and discussions throughout the rest of “Reading like a writer” cogent and compelling, I have to differ with regard to “Pedro Paramo”. I have read fairly widely in science fiction, and “Pedro Paramo” does not belong in that classification.

I don’t know if the author intended it to be read as magic realism, but I feel that it belongs there. I don’t think that it is, in any way, a work of art. I found it tedious, and was glad that it has only 122 pages. Even at that I struggled to keep any interest in the book, and was ready to abandon it on several occasions.

With the best will in the world I can’t score it any higher than 2/10, and I had to force myself to go even that high. Don’t waste your time on this book.