THE BURNING PLAIN

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 novel Pedro 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.