The Golden Rooster

Narrative brief, intense, austere and deeply symbolic, rooted in the rural world of Mexico. Written in the 1950s but published posthumously, it follows the life of Dionísio, his fighting cock, La Camponera, and a violent and unstable world.

The book is marked by an austere and evocative language, typical of Rulfo, and plunges the reader into an atmosphere of fatalism, where the characters' destinies seem always determined by poverty, by passion and by a certain inevitable violence.

More than about fighting cocks, The Golden Cock is a reflection on luck, desire and the human condition. It reminds us caustically that dreams and disillusionments go hand in hand.

Juan Rulfo, born in 1917 in Mexico, wrote little, but enough to become a myth. With Plains of Fire and the novel Pedro Páramo, he changed Latin American literature forever. He was an orphan, a civil servant, a photographer. He wrote as one who burns the last pieces of their own soul. He dismantled rural literature and put his fingers in the wound of the Mexican soul.

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