The burning plain

Juan Rulfo

Book - 2024

"El Llano en llamas is considered a classic of Mexican literature. The collection of short stories takes place in rural Jalisco where Mexicans struggle to survive after the Mexican Revolution. Juan Rulfo is one of the most important writers of twentieth-century Mexico, though he wrote only two books--the novel Pedro Páramo (1955) and the short story collection El Llano en llamas (1953). First translated into English in 1967 as The Burning Plain, these starkly realistic stories create a psychologically acute portrait of poverty and dignity in the countryside at a time when Mexico was undergoing rapid industrialization following the upheavals of the Revolution."--Provided by publisher.

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FICTION/Rulfo Juan
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1st Floor New Shelf FICTION/Rulfo Juan (NEW SHELF) Due Jan 20, 2025
Subjects
Genres
Historical fiction
Short stories
Published
Austin : University of Texas Press 2024.
Language
English
Spanish
Main Author
Juan Rulfo (author)
Other Authors
Douglas Weatherford (translator)
Edition
First edition
Item Description
Originally published in Spanish in 1953.
Physical Description
xii, 146 pages ; 22 cm
ISBN
9781477329962
  • They have given us the land
  • La Cuesta de las Comadres
  • Because we're so poor
  • The man
  • In the early morning
  • Talpa
  • Macario
  • The burning plain
  • Tell them not to kill me!
  • Luvina
  • The night they left him alone
  • Paso del Norte
  • Remember
  • You don't hear dogs barking
  • The day of the collapse
  • The legacy of Matilde Arcángel
  • Anacleto Morones.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Weatherford's fresh new translation of this seminal 1953 collection from Mexican writer Rulfo (1917--1986) lays bare the enigmatic potency of its stories about love, poverty, and violence. In "Talpa," the narrator returns home alone after fulfilling his sick brother's wish to receive a miracle cure in the eponymous town, despite knowing his brother would never survive the journey. In "The Man," an unnamed protagonist is following someone, but he is also being followed. Later, the reader learns the protagonist is on the run after massacring a family. As characters trek across vast and arduous desert terrain, it can be hard to distinguish the real from the imaginary, which adds to the book's power. Rulfo makes effective use of confessional, first-person narrators, whose admissions of wrongdoing are proffered with a shocking nonchalance, as in "La Cuesta de les Comadres," whose protagonist admits to killing his good friend. Despite the economic prose style, Rulfo doesn't eschew metaphorical lyricism, as in "Talpa," where the narrator reflects on being swept up by the crowd descending onto the town ("Never had I felt life to be so leaden and violent as it was while walking among that swarm of people, as if we were a knot of worms writhing under the sun"). This will please Rulfo's devotees and earn him new ones. (Sept.)

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A new translation of the sole short-story collection published in the lifetime of Rulfo (1917-86), Mexico's greatest modernist fiction writer. In this--beg pardon--searing collection from 1953, Rulfo airs a worldview dark enough to make Cormac McCarthy look like P.G. Wodehouse. El Llano Grande, or Great Plain, is a real place in Rulfo's native Jalisco. Here, as in his classic novelPedro Páramo (1955), it is a place of constant suffering that ceases only at the grave. In the opening story, four guerrillas cross the sun-blasted desert, aching for rain after a "lone drop that fell in error is quickly devoured by the earth and disappears in its thirst." Rain will not come, nor the drink from the distant river that would have been theirs had they horses to ride. But no; laments one, "So much land, so immense, and all for nothing." The locals don't have it any better; in one bitter story, Rulfo conjures up an all-shattering earthquake in an impoverished town on which the grandiloquent governor and coterie descend, practically eating the survivors out of house and home: "We concur in the assistance," the governor bloviates, "not with any Neronian desire to find pleasure in the suffering of others…imminently willing to munificently utilize our efforts in the reconstruction of all homes that were destroyed, fraternally willing in the consolation of those homes brought asunder by death." Death is everywhere: Many of Rulfo's characters are murderers, whether accidental or by careful design ("The dead weigh more than the living; they push you down," thinks one), while others are victims, as with--shades of the present--a villager who travels north to find work in the orchards of Oregon, only to be killed, perhaps by the border patrol or perhaps by bandidos, and return home a ghost. Spectral stories shot through with violence and sorrow, and beautiful for all that. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.