—What exactly do you understand?
She placed herself by his side, leaned on his shoulders and repeated:
—What exactly do you understand?
It was surreal to read this passage for the first time some three years ago. Few books have floored me like Pedro Paramo, which went so far as to push me to learn its original Spanish so I could read it as the author intended. On the legends of the past, the novel’s impact was even more powerful: Jorge Luis Borges lauded it as one of the greatest novels in not only Hispanic literature, but in literature as a whole. Gabriel Garcia Marquez credits it for pulling him from a writer’s block that paved the path for him to write One Hundred Years of Solitude, his magnum opus. Susan Sontag declared the novel “one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century world literature.” It is a novel filled with silence; I sometimes wonder, as I slave away at my own work, how Rulfo did it, how he made every page speak in whispers harrowed with sorrow and despair.
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