In The Mouth a Desert

On Juan Rulfo's short stories

The work of Juan Rulfo is narrow but inestimably deep; Gabriel Garcia Marquez once said that while Rulfo published only about 300 pages in his lifetime, they were as durable and important as the 300 or so pages we got from Sophocles. In Pedro Paramo (1955), Rulfo essentially inaugurated the Latin American genre of magical realism, combining Kafka’s otherworldliness with Faulkner’s hard modernism; in the short stories of The Burning Plain (1953), recently released in a new translation by Douglas J. Weatherford, Rulfo’s idiosyncratic eye is cast over the denizens of the deserts of Northern Mexico. Across vignettes of post-revolutionary life, Rulfo displays a deep, unflinching interest in the lives of his characters without ever becoming sentimental; he is never overly hopeful or unduly pessimistic, but only ever real. Add Chekhov and Joyce to the list of influences and credible comparisons to Rulfo; even just this one collection, like Joyce’s Dubliners, is enough to enshrine him as a chronicler of minute but epically rendered lives.