Back in the abandoned Comala of the present, Eduviges tells Juan Preciado about his mother’s unhappy marriage to Pedro, which barely lasted a year. After a heavy rainstorm, young Pedro Páramo fantasizes about Susana, the girl he loves, and runs errands for his family. In fragments six through eight, the novel switches to the unrecognizable, lush Comala of the distant past. A ghostly woman sends him to Doña Eduviges Dyada, an old friend of his mother’s, who offers him a room in the back of her empty, half-destroyed house. When Juan arrives in Comala, the town seems empty, but there are voices and strange beings everywhere.

In the second story, set in the distant past and narrated mostly in the third person, the destitute farmer Pedro Páramo manipulates and terrorizes the people of Comala until he seizes nearly absolute power over the town.Īt the beginning of the novel, Dolores Preciado tells her son to visit Comala, find his father Pedro Páramo, and “make him pay for all those years he put us out of his mind.” Juan meets the burro driver Abundio Martínez on the scorching desert road to Comala, which is practically abandoned and lies “at the very mouth of hell.” Abundio reports that Pedro Páramo is his father, too, and has been dead for years. But instead of the lush, fertile town of his mother Dolores’s memories, he finds Comala abandoned, dried up, and full of ghosts. In the first, Juan Preciado narrates his journey to Comala after his beloved mother’s death in an attempt to find his long-lost father, Pedro Páramo. At least initially, the novel can be divided into two main stories. Pedro Páramo tells the story of Comala, a small town in rural Mexico, through 68 short fragments that frequently jump between different plots, moments, and narrators.

Pedro paramo english