Shabbat Reading: Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo

#whatireadovershabbat Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo, translated by Douglas J. Weatherford (1955; Grover, 2023)

Pedro Páramo inspired a generation of Latin American writers. Gabriel García Márquez, for one, credited it with inspiring One Hundred Years of Solitude. This slim, hallucinatory novel, set in revolutionary era Mexico, demands tough readers. Rulfo expects you to hold on tight to a plot that wants to buck you, heaving back and forth in time, alternating willfully between the voices of the living and the dead. I’ve never read a book quite like it.