Shaji N Karun chose for Bookie his last-read book pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo, the one that he was absorbed in after Kutty Srank set sail. “Perhaps,” said he, “that is why, the magical realism of Juan Rulfo was an all the more endearing experience. Kutty Srank, with its non-linear narrative, does have a fleeting element of the magical.”
The ace director talked in his husky, hesitant voice that would rather be quiet in the sea of words and sights around. He could only bring himself to can up in reel tales of lives lived just about five times in his 32-year-long career as director. Piravi happened in 1989 and in the intermittent years till Kutty Srank, his films came out as if they were words that had to be uttered so the silence can prevail, tears that had to be shed so the grief can crystallise.
Rulfo’s gripping tale spans just 124 pages. And his repute as one of Latin America’s most powerful writers rests on two slim books, a collection of short stories titled, El Llano en llamas (1953) and the short novel, ‘Pedro Páramo’ (1955). 15 of the 17 short stories have been translated into English and published as ‘The Burning Plain and Other Stories’ which includes his much admired tale, ‘Tell Them, Not to Kill Me!’. Rulfo’s fiction is deeply marked by his childhood in Jalisco, which was undergoing a period of political unrest in the 1920’s. His father was killed in the furore and ‘Tell Them, Not to Kill Me’ is an autobiographical revisit into the traumatic past.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who had experienced a writer’s block after his first four books, has acknowledged the influence of Pedro Paramo, in the penning of his magnum opus, ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’. Marquez has noted that all of Rulfo’s published writing, put together, “add up to no more than 300 pages; but that is almost as many, and I believe they are as durable, as the pages that have come down to us from Sophocles.”
‘Pedro Paramo’, often hailed as the pioneering work in the genre of Magical Realism, progresses through fragmented images and fragmented narrations. The story, seemingly unravelling in a defined Latin American setting, is to Shaji N Karun, a work that defies the “man-made concepts of spatial and temporal dimensions” of which “most fictional works are slavish in attitude.” Rulfo, born into a family of landowners, again has relied heavily on lived experiences to weave the complicated metanarrative revealed through voices of the dead that overtakes the first person account of Juan Preciado who has come to Comala, in search of his father, Pedro Paramo.
Neither the town nor the father are known to Juan except from the stories told to him by his mother who made him promise on her death bed to find Paramo and reclaim the land he owed her and the son. Juan loses himself to the ghost town’s lingering inhabitants and their stories that traverse the doomed landscape like wishes unfulfilled. Paramo’s love, Susana whose estrangement leads him into deranged destructiveness has her own sad tale to tell and so do the villagers whose spirits languish in the barren land accusing Paramo of taking the town to the grave with him. The cinematographer in Shaji N Karun, is bewitched by the images that are created by the novel. “It is one work that can render itself to unending images”, he said. Perhaps, Rulfo’s other passion, photography, has made an impact on his writings. The Mexican poet Octavio Paz once said that Rulfo is “the only Mexican novelist to have provided us an image - rather than a mere description - of our physical surroundings.”
In fact, the book has inspired about four or five movies apart from two English translations. But the director is not reluctant to confess that the book lends itself to a more impressionable imaging in the reader’s mind than the screened version, “because when you read you become the person and your interpretation is as boundless as your imagination. You have the liberty to see as much as your experiences and past memories allow. The movies on the other hand are synthesised interpretations of others, like how Draupadi has been subject to countless interpretations.”
To my attempts to relate the book to his own ouvre, the patient lensman said that the book was to him only another of the sights he met on the waysides. While he added that the Latin American Magical Realism was inspired by the landscape and its inherent poverty, “more as a means to escape the hard realities” he said the emotions depicted are universal and timeless.
aswathy@expressbuzz.com
(The weekly column brings you the favourite read of the who’s who of society)