David's Reviews > Pedro Páramo

I re-read this book in March 2012, almost a year later and loved this book. The tone is one of a mystery: mother dies and tells her son to return to their home town, Comala, Mexico and find his father, Pedro Paramo. The town is a ghost-town and we are never sure of the people he meets, are they alive or ghosts? Plus most of the time it rains setting up an eery mood. Through these random discourses with the townspeople, the tale unravels about his father, the women he has had and the last wife leads us to the father. I also liked the fact that as the stories are uncovered, the son as narator begins to fade away, becoming part of the ghost town. This book written in 1950, according to the cover notes was key to the Magic Realism movement of Latin America, influencing Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the Mexican author Carlos Fuentes. A difficult book (see my review below) but on a second read I see the patterns, the issues and the greatness of this little book. What was I thinking when I first read it?


Original review
I have to admit that the book confused me when the main subject, who went looking for his father, Pedro Paramo suddenly disappears? Becomes his father? Dies? It was an unsettling feeling. Having said this, I loved the idea that everyone he meets is dead or about to die in the empty town of Comala. The eeriness and almost magical feeling certainly predates any of the magic realists and yet the story unravels nicely (despite my confusion).