Pedro Páramo
Novela , 1955
Editorial RM
Páginas 136
“Desconcertante, lista a inquietar a la crítica, está ya en los escaparates la primera novela de Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo, que transcurre en una serie de transposiciones oníricas, ahondando más allá de la muerte de sus personajes, que uno no sabe en qué momento son sueño, vida, fábula, verdad, pero a los que se les oye la voz al través de la ‘perspicacia despiadada y certera’ de tan sin duda extraordinario escritor.” Con estas palabras iniciaba Edmundo Valadés la primera reseña de Pedro Páramo, aparecida el 30 de marzo de 1955 y conservada por Rulfo entre sus papeles.
Desde entonces, escritores como Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Günter Grass, Susan Sontag y Mario Vargas Llosa, o el cineasta Werner Herzog, entre muchos más de cualquier lengua, coinciden en calificar esta novela como una de las obras maestras de la literatura de todos los tiempos. La encuesta del Instituto Nobel de Suecia, de 2002, dirigida a un centenar de escritores y estudiosos de todo el mundo, ubicó a Pedro Páramo entre las cien obras que constituyen el núcleo del patrimonio universal de la literatura. Sus traducciones se acercan al medio centenar.
“A strange, brooding novel . . . Great immediacy, power, and beauty.” Washington Post
“The essential Mexican novel, unsurpassed and unsurpassable . . . Extraordinary.” Carlos Fuentes
“Pedro Páramo is not only one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century world literature but one of the most influential of the century’s books.” Susan Sontag
“That night I didn’t sleep until I’d read it twice; not since I had read Kafka’s Metamorphosis in a dingy boarding house in Bogotá, almost ten years earlier, had I been so overcome.” Gabriel García Márquez
“A simplicity and profundity worthy of Greek tragedy . . . Wuthering Heights located in Mexico and written by Kafka.” Guardian
“It makes more sense to map Rulfo within a constellation of writers like T.S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett and Franz Kafka, writers who took literature to the frontiers of their languages, who wrote in a kind of ‘foreign’ tongue, in that they allowed strangeness to seep into the familiar and turn the everyday into the uncanny . . . I have no hesitation in saying that there is no novel more mesmerizing and paradigm-shifting.” Valeria Luiselli, New York Times
“Rulfo’s novel constantly challenges the reader. It defies comprehension, with confusion and fragmentation central to what seems an unstable fictional world. The text vacillates between presence and absence, between reality and irreality, and even between life and death. At the same time, Rulfo’s writing is defined by a faith in the ability of diligent readers to discover interpretive possibilities hidden within the disintegration of the novel.” Douglas J. Weatherford, Literary Hub