Broken Psychedelic Genius: Read Juan Rulfo's Pedro Baramo

When it comes to foreign literature, domestic readers are mainly familiar with the major countries such as Britain, France, Germany, the United States and Russia, as well as neighboring Japan. There are also brilliant masterpieces in other countries, but they are rarely paid attention to. For example, this "Pedro Baramo" is the most famous modern novel in Mexico, but few people in China have heard of it. I know very little about Mexican culture, and I would probably have missed this book if I hadn't heard that Borges and García Márquez liked it so much.

In Private Collections: Prefaces, Borges says "Pedro Baramo is one of the best novels in Spanish literature, and one of the best in all literature." And Márquez is even more exaggerated. In "A Brief Remembrance of Juan Rulfo" he wrote: "I can recite the whole book, and I can recite it backwards without big mistakes. And I can tell every story. On which page of the book I was reading, there wasn't a single character that I wasn't familiar with." So I read this book with very high expectations. After reading it, it really feels extraordinary, and it can be called a work of genius.

"Pedro Baramo" is very short, less than 100,000 words, but the weight is very large, and the first time you read it, you can't digest it at all. I think the first reaction of many readers after reading this book is to read it from the beginning.

The storyline of this novel is very ordinary, mainly about a landowner named Pedro Baramo, who bullies men and women and does all kinds of evil, making the people difficult for life, and the villagers run away to death. In the end, the whole village decays into a dead city. . As long as you know a little Latin American history or novels, you will not be unfamiliar with this kind of tyranny. The great thing about Pedro Baramo is not its storyline, but its groundbreaking writing.

Generally speaking, a novel will have a unified narrative perspective, such as first-person, third-person, followed by one or more clue characters that advance the narrative. Although flashbacks and interludes are common, most novels are narrated in chronological order. And this book completely disrupts the narrative perspective, characters, time, and space, and it feels like a montage in a movie.

At the beginning of the novel, "I" accepts my mother's dying request to return to my hometown of Comara to find my father, Pedro Baramo, whom he has never met. But while reading, the content suddenly jumped to a boy who was missing a girl named Susana. Read a few more pages and we'll find out that the boy is Pedro Baramo in his childhood. Next, he turned his writing and returned to "me". "I" was chatting with Mrs. Ai Du Weihais, the landlord of the lodging house. She talked incessantly and upside-down about the old past, and the content of the novel became a She will narrate. The whole book is written in this way, where every few pages become a seemingly unrelated piece of content that, upon careful consideration, is interconnected. And this book is not divided into chapters, nor does it indicate who the narrator is. You must pay full attention when reading it, otherwise you will be confused if you are not careful. As you become familiar with the characters and events, the more you read the later stories, the clearer the story will become, and the relationship between characters and the order of time and space will be gradually clarified, but it is inevitable that you will miss or confuse some details when you read the book for the first time. Impulse all over again.

If this chaotic and intertwined narrative is enough to be dazzling, what is even more surprising is that the book also breaks the distinction between life and death. People who are obviously dead still appear in the storyline just like the living. Pedro Baramo, for example, had a rambunctious son, Miguel Baramo, who went to see Mrs. Edwin Hayes one night. He said he went to find his fiancée in another village, but there was thick fog everywhere, so he couldn't find that village. Mrs. Edwin Hayes told him he must be dead. It was only after dawn that it turned out that Miguel Balamo had fallen to his death while riding over a stone wall. By the end, the reader will find that there are not many living people in the whole book.

Even if the plot sequence of the whole book and the life and death of the characters are figured out, the puzzle is still incomplete. Almost every plot is in line with Hemingway's iceberg principle, with little surface content and a lot of content behind the reader's imagination and speculation. For example, the Mexican Revolution is written in the book, without any positive description, it is all implied by dialogue. Because of this, there's an amazing amount of content in a short book, with room to dig deeper for each character. A prominent example is Father Redria, whose brother was killed by Miguel Baramo and whose niece was also raped by Miguel Baramo. After the death of Miguel Baramo, he took money from Pedro Baramo and conscientiously blessed the bad guys. But after the death of the good love Duve Hayes, because her sister Maria Diada had no money, the priest refused to do mass for her. The priest violated the teachings, committed injustice, and at the same time deeply blamed himself, and finally joined the revolution. The pen and ink used on the priest in the whole book are only a few thousand words, but the characters are very full and three-dimensional.

After reading this, you might be thinking: Well, this is a modern novel with a lot of tricks, maybe the technique is really new, but why should I go so far as to compete with a Mexican novel? To be honest, I've always been averse to modernist novels. This book appeals to me not because of the tricks and ingenuity, but because of the poetry-like text, which is so concise and memorable that I want to read every paragraph out loud.

Take the opening paragraph of the book:

I came to Comala because someone told me that my father lives here and his name seems to be Pedro Baramo. This is what my mother told me. I assured her that I would visit him as soon as she passed away. I held her old man's hands tightly, expressing that I must fulfill my promise. She was dying at this point, and I planned to meet all her demands. "You must go and see him," she urged me. "He's called this name and that. I think he'll be happy to see you." Said, I must do as she said. I said the same sentence over and over again, until her hands were stiff, and then with great difficulty I pulled my hands back.

It's such a simple passage, but it has the power to keep reading. It can be compared with the famous opening of Camus' "The Outsider" "Today, mother died. Maybe it was yesterday, I can't figure it out.".

and also:

Father Redria will recall that night many years later. That night, the firm bed made it difficult for him to sleep, forcing him out of the house. Miguel Balamo died that night.

Thinking about it now, the opening of "One Hundred Years of Solitude", "Many years later, Colonel Aureliano, standing before the firing squad, will surely remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to visit the ice cubes." Probably borrowed from here.

In the book, Pedro Balamo's love words about Susana are also very touching: "Your lips are very moist, as if you have been kissed by the morning dew." "There was a huge moon in the world at that time. I looked at you, looked at Broken eyes."

This is a beautiful book and a maze of intricate and intricate puzzles. To borrow a sentence from Eileen Chang's evaluation of "A Dream of Red Mansions", this book can be called "one to serve ten", and it can withstand repeated reading. Among the top world famous books, this book must have a seat.

Broken Psychedelic Genius: Read Juan Rulfo's Pedro Baramo