wtf is Pedro Páramo?
Pedro Páramo is a 1955 novel by the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo, which has gotten new buzz with a brand new 2023 translation by Douglas J. Weatherford. The type of buzz where my Brooklyn book club is reading it, strangers on the subway can be seen reading it, and apparently it’s getting a Netflix adaptation, which will be very interesting because this book is inscrutable. Nonlinear, surreal, possibly magical realist, what starts as a book about a man traveling to find his estranged father becomes a book so difficult to understand that the reader often doesn’t know who is talking, who is alive, who is a ghost, etc. I’ve read it once. I have no idea what happened.
wtf is wtf is Pedro Páramo?
A section-by-section guide to reading and understanding (maybe) Pedro Páramo. We’re going to approach this thing painfully slowly, sometimes a page at a time, and create some awful nightmare digital index cards and red string board to try to crack what actually happens in this book. It might not ultimately “explain” Pedro Páramo (there’s a pretty long summary on the book’s Wikipedia page, that, honestly, had I thought to look up could’ve saved me this whole project, I guess), but it will answer a greater question: is everyone reading this right now just kinda all posers?
wtf is a Substack subscription
While you can subscribe to this recap blog for free, only paid subscriptions get access to every post. Every third post is for paid subscribers only. This blog is a labor of love, but it takes time to do and I appreciate the idea of at least getting paid in coffee for it. I’ve made a subscription as cheap as Substack will let me make it, I run sales when I can, and if you miss one and regret it don’t even worry about it.
wtf is Obsidian
Obsidian is a note-taking software that I recently switched over to after years of despising EverNote. It’s great, but I barely know how to use it. So this blog is also an experiment in learning how to use the advanced (or even basic lol) features of this software. Obsidian is not sponsoring wtf is Pedro Páramo. Yet. Obsidian, you should get in touch with me.
wtf is the author of this blog
My name is Matthew Julius. I have previously written about arts and culture for NPR, Kill Screen, and my previous book recap blog, Bad Books Good Times. I’ve also written poetry about watching horror movies, which has appeared in Kissing Dynamite, Heavy Feather Review, and Full Stop Quarterly. I’m a medical editor as a career, a volunteer copy editor for The NYC Thorn, previously book reviews editor for Kissing Dynamite, and I play guitar in a band called Good Cry. My other substack blog, ReadOnly, is where I write about what I’m reading and post other updates about what I’m up to. I can be found as @mattjuliusyeah on most socials, and assorted works can be found at linktr.ee/matthewjulius. I like to make my cat watch horror movies with me.
wtf else
Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo. Translated from Spanish by Douglas J. Weatherford. Foreword by Gabriel García Márquez. Grove Press.
Ghost stock photo by Febe Venermen on Unsplash.
