Pedro Páramo

"Rulfo’s writing is especially dear to me because we come from the same place, and because reading him was to discover the vast poetic potential of the rural landscape, of forgotten villages, rather than the cosmopolitan world or urban forms of culture. Rulfo does a lot of things in this novel, while endowing a tremendous poetic force both to language and to the events, the characters and the atmospheres he describes; he experiments with a fragmentary structure; breaks down the sense of reality through the idea of the ghost and the popular legends, the people’s sayings. Comala is a powerful mythical universe that represents abandonment and loss from many angles. The characters have an extraordinary strength and reach a very complex degree of conflict, determined above all by the fragility and harm of a very macho way of understanding masculinity. The novel flows between narrative moments, evoking resonances… it’s a dream novel. Of course, Rulfo inhabits the spaces of The Forgery and the murmurs of his prose echo through the corners of the house. It’s well known that Luis Barragán, who is one of the characters in The Forgery , was inspired by Rulfo’s writings when he built the atmospheric architecture that won him the Pritzker Prize , and there are significant overlaps between the two: they build spaces with the same adobe roofs and walls, they make the same water pitchers resound. I am full of admiration for them both."

"In the original Spanish. It's one of those guilt-books so many Mexican lit lovers know they should read, but flee."