Pedro Páramo, by Juan Rulfo

A couple of months ago I did a post about the Guardian’s list of what it deemed to be the 100 best novels of all time. One book on that list was Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo. I’d never heard of it before, and was delighted to receive a gift of it (and relieved that it was an English translation from the original Spanish). I’ve just finished reading it. The story, set in Mexico, begins with a character called Juan Preciado, who promises to his mother on her deathbed that he will travel to a place called Comala to find his father, whom he has never met before. The book begins with a conventional first-person narrative by Preciado about his journey, but soon dissolves when he reaches his destination into complex fragments told in different voices. Thereafter the tale resolves itself into a series of conversations and encounters, but the precise sequence of these is difficult to discern. For instance, about halfway through the book we discover that everything that has happened is actually a…