Juan Rulfo's work marks a profound transformation of the realistic narrative, introducing a rural environment impregnated with social intention. His best-known books by far are El llano en llamas (1953) and Pedro Páramo (1955), in which the author treats a subject in an indirect way, disappearing from the story. Rulfo does it to show the facts right away,  but by his relentless nudity of expression, through the characters themselves. He may have learned this narrative technique working as a screenwriter for film and television, but there is no doubt that it makes an indelible impression on the reader. Each page has been worked with absolute rigor. Hence the astonishing perfection of his works and the density of content and style they contain.

Rulfo transcends the realistic approach of other contemporary writers with the incorporation of fantasy into his stories.  In its pages, the direct vision of the most brutal realities coexists masterfully with hallucinatory visions. The image of a world inhabited by strange beings, by ghosts, by unknown forces, makes Rulfo one of the first masters of what has been called “magical realism”. It incorporates new narrative techniques such as breaking of the chronological development of the story, the use of the interior monologue, abruptly alternation of dialogues,  and unexpected change of points of view, among others. There is no doubt that he is one of the great renovators of the Hispanic American narrative, with a work in which coexists the local with the universal, the social, and the human, all of it integrated within an elaborate and curated literary aesthetic.

El llano en llamas 

Pedro Páramo 

Paloma herida

El gallo de oro

The short stories of El llano en llanas represent a socio-political denunciation, under a mythical substratum in a circular time in which nothing changes and the human being is the victim eternally oppressed by the fatality of misery and unavoidable ignorance.

Short Story

The Latin American boom is a literary phenomenon that emerged in the 1960s when a prodigious renewal of the Latin American narrative took place. Readers from all over the world discovered authors as representative today as Carpentier, Rulfo, Cortázar, Borges, Fuentes, Donoso, Vargas Llosa, and García Márquez. The works of these writers are characterized by a great thematic variety, with a preference for the urban novel (Cortázar, Fuentes) and a renewed treatment of the rural (Rulfo, García Márquez). 

Defining feature is the masterful fusion of the fantastic and the real, what is known as 'magical realism', the most representative example of which is García Márquez's extensive novel Cien años de soledad. These authors produce a total renovation of the structure of the story, often breaking the plotline, with habitual changes from the perspective of the narrator and jumps in the time during the action. The experimentation is so extraordinary that it ends up affecting the language itself, overlapping styles and registers and often distorting the syntax and lexicon, many of the authors of this time becoming icons of the history of literature.

Latinoamerican Literature

García Márquez writes Cien años de soledad, novel that recounts a century in the life of the Buendía family, today it is still considered a masterpiece of Latin American literature and one of the classic examples of magical realism.

Mario Vargas Llosa writes La ciudad y los perros, novel about the one related to the violent experiences of the interned cadets of the last three years of Secondary Education of the Leoncio Prado Military School in the capital of Peru.

Julio Cortazar writes Rayuela, a novel whose story puts the reader's subjectivity at stake and has multiple endings.

Carlos Fuentes writes La muerte de Artemio Cruz,  a milestone in the Latin American Boom.

María Luisa Bombal writes La amortajada,  novel that reflects the social conditions of the 1930s in Chile.

Spanish Bites

About

Book Club

Library

Premium

El llano en llamas (1953)

By Juan Rulfo

Time Period: Latinoamerican Literature

Genre: Short Story

Spanish Bites

External Resources

Maria