Pedro Páramo

Published in 1955, it is a short, brutal, and lyrical murmur. It opens the doors to Comala, a forgotten village where the dead speak, the living disappear, and time dissolves, like dust, in the wind.

Juan Preciado goes in search of his father, Pedro Páramo, and finds a landscape populated by restless souls and ruins. The narrative is a labyrinth of intersecting voices, in a suffocating atmosphere . Nothing is linear, nothing is easy. It is heard with the whole body. It is endured like a fever.

Juan Rulfo (1917–1986) wrote little, but said it all (or almost). With only Pedro Páramo and Chão em Chamas, he dismantled rural literature and put his fingers in the wound of the Mexican soul. His writing is sharp. It has no mercy.

Gabriel García Márquez confessed that, without reading Rulfo, One Hundred Years of Solitude would have been another book.