Examining ‘Pedro Páramo’ Before ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’

Examining ‘Pedro Páramo’ Before ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’

The novella “Pedro Páramo” by the magical realism pioneer Juan Rulfo, directly inspired Gabriel García Márquez’s masterpiece, “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” Recently, Netflix released a film adaptation of “Pedro Páramo,” premiering over a month before the series adaptation of “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” This film ambitiously weaves together a labyrinth of life, death, memory, and shifting narrators.

“Many years later, Father Rentería would remember how the stiffness of his bed made him unable to sleep that night, until he finally was forced to get out of bed. It was the night that Miguel Páramo died.” This line appears in the later part of “Pedro Páramo.” Sounds familiar? Doesn’t it resemble the famous opening line from “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” often cited in discussions of Latin American magical realism: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

In fact, Márquez was a devoted fan of Rulfo. Writing a tribute to Rulfo for the reissue of “Pedro Páramo,” Márquez recalled discovering the novella by this once unheard-of author in 1961 while living in a Mexico City apartment. “That night, I read it twice before going to bed.” Years later, while assisting with the review and revision of a film adaptation, Márquez went even further to “confess” his love for the novella, “I could recite the entire book by heart, forward and backward with almost no error. I could even pinpoint each story’s page in the copy I read. There isn’t a single character whose traits I’m not intimately familiar with.”

“After that, the land became a wasteland, and was in ruins. [...] From one end to the other, people lost interest in the land and went to find other more attractive places. I remember days when Comala was filled with goodbyes[.]” In his work, Rulfo vividly portrayed Comala, a once-thriving town that declined—a setting reminiscent of Macondo in “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” and a metaphor for the Mexican towns that continuously disappeared after being devastated by revolutionary upheavals in recent modern history.

Netflix’s “Pedro Páramo” marks the directorial debut of Rodrigo Prieto, the longtime cinematographer for Alejandro González Iñárritu. With his vast expertise and extensive experience, Prieto captured both the prosperity and desolation of his homeland, Mexico. The film was shot in the hot, arid landscapes of San Luis Potosí in the central-northern part of the country, and Villa de Reyes was transformed into the novella’s Comala. Through set design and post-production color grading, the film presents three distinct worlds: in his childhood, the titular protagonist Pedro Páramo and his playmate Susana San Juan chased kites and clung dearly to each other on the fertile and verdant land; in the later era, Pedro becomes a tyrannical landlord, corrupting the land and oppressing its people; and, in a "magical realism" setting, Juan Preciado, one of Pedro’s estranged sons, arrives at Comala, now an uninhabited, ghostly underworld, with his mother’s final wish to find his father.

“I came to Comala because I was told that my father, a man called Pedro Páramo, was living there. It was what my mother had told me. She was near death, and I would have promised her anything.” In the Netflix adaptation, Juan’s voiceover faithfully follows the novella’s opening. However, take note: the scene begins with a downward pan inside a grave, subtly signaling that the narrator is already dead. The film then closely follows the novella as Juan, en route to Comala, encounters a mule driver who reveals, “I am also Pedro Páramo’s son.” As they part ways, he suggests Juan visit Doña Eduviges, “if she’s still alive.” This encounter sets the magical realist tone for both the novella and the film.

Neither the novella nor the film is limited to a single narrator. The intricate relationships among the characters are largely unveiled posthumously, as Juan lies in the soil between heaven and hell, hearing the voices of Comala’s deceased residents. Rulfo offered little to no direct description or explanation of the numerous characters and their connections to Pedro. Instead, readers are left to independently infer their actions and behaviors, as well as inner thoughts, and later picture their images and fates. For this foundational work of magical realism, such an open narrative approach invites readers to actively participate and reflect. But when translated into film, which often requires a clearer storyline through audiovisual language and dialogue, can the novella’s approach still succeed?

Prieto attempted to recreate the novella’s labyrinthine structure of interwoven time and space through parallel editing without clear transitions, combined with an extensive use of flashbacks—often making the narrative maze even more complex. This approach, unsurprisingly, has not been universally appreciated; many viewers have protested by rating the film poorly, noting that without a recent reading of the novella, they found it incomprehensible. Fortunately, I read the novella immediately after watching the film. It’s not a lengthy book—after all, it was the one Márquez read twice before going to sleep.

For example, early in the film, Doña tells Juan, who has come to stay, that the half-brother he encountered on the road has already died. In Pedro’s timeline, this same woman tells another visiting son of Pedro’s, “You are already dead.” Later, we see Doña disappear from the attic where she is, only for another woman to inform Juan, “Doña has long been dead.” For readers immersed in the novella, it’s clear that Rulfo was deliberately blurring the boundary between life and death, allowing the dead to converse and reminisce like the living. But in the film, this blurring can drive audiences to frustration—who is real, who is a dream, who is alive, and who is dead?

While the relationships and story logic in “Pedro Páramo” are undeniably complex, the film’s mesmerizing portrayal of Comala, achieved through exceptional audiovisual techniques, captures a psychedelic atmosphere. Juan suddenly finds himself standing alone in the empty street, with windows of houses all open to the air, weed stems hanging out of them, and the adobe bricks at the top of the bare cattle pens are damp. These descriptions from the novella were vividly conveyed by cinematographer-turned-director Prieto. He further intensified the eerie ambiance through subjective shots, crucial to horror, to depict the unsettling image of the body of a “woman made of earth, or wrapped in a crust of earth” that looks as though it is “melting away in a puddle of mud,” bringing to life the novella’s chilling tones.

Márquez had long identified two primary issues in adapting “Pedro Páramo,” dating back to his role in script review and revisions for Carlos Velo’s 1967 film adaptation. The first was the names: Rulfo had named his characters based on gravestone inscriptions, making it nearly impossible to find actors who could visually match the poetic weight of those names. The second issue was age: Rulfo refrained from specifying the characters' ages, relying instead on a sense of poetic intuition—a less evocative element in cinema. “In the darkness of the theater, an elderly romance moves no one,” Márquez insisted. Was he perhaps thinking about his next book, “Love in the Time of Cholera”?

The 1967 adaptation took a relatively straightforward approach. Velo removed characters that contributed to the novella’s magical aura but did little to advance the plot. He also transformed much of the first-person narration into substantive dialogue to better convey information and rearranged the story’s labyrinthine timeline into a more linear sequence, bringing the story of Pedro and his son closer in time. Yet, even with these changes, Márquez admitted, “The adapted script became an entirely different book—flat and disordered—but it also helped me understand Rulfo more profoundly.”