The Burning Plain & Other Stories by Juan Rulfo (1953)

A collection of 15 short stories buried in the earth of Mexico, by the author of Pedro Paramo.

Book Review: The Burning Plain and Other Stories was Juan Rulfo's first work of fiction. In these stories, the reader sinks deep into the Mexican soil, a landscape coated with dust, bones parched, burned by the sun, desperate for water. Suffering and death are always near. Vengeance is real: "I shouldn't have killed all of them," the man was thinking. "It wasn't worth it putting such a burden on my back. Dead people weight more than live ones." We feel the futility of fighting fate. Just a few story titles: "We're Very Poor," "Tell Them Not to Kill Me," "No Dogs Bark." The stories seem to take place in a haze, in the dark, it's often difficult see clearly, as in a dream. Many times the end of the story is close to where it began. Plot is present in The Burning Plain, but isn't the driving force. These stories are built on character, and in learning to know the characters, we see what made them, how they got to where they are, how life and fate and Mexico created them and put them in this place at this time, facing this hard moment. These women and men feel the full burden of Mexico's social pressures, of the true effects of the Revolution: ("They grinned with their toothless mouths and told me no, that the government didn't have a mother"). Some of the stories are quite short, but none are slight. One story turns the life and mistreatment of a child into a parable of the Mexican peasantry. In another, the loss of a cow shows how close every family is to disaster. One tells of the hard road north to the Estados Unidos. There are many good stories, and they tend to hit with a soft, quiet power, not a heavy emotional punch. A few of my favorites are "Talpa," a story of a haunted, ill-fated love; "Luvina," a town that could be near where Pedro Paramo lived; "The Night They Left Him Alone," where death waits at the end of the path; and the clever, dark humor of "Anacleto Morones." The future ghost of Gabriel Garcia Marquez lives in the stories of The Burning Plain. This is the kind of book that can be pulled down from the shelf several times a year to revisit a story, and relive that moment.

The translation of this edition, well done by George D. Schade (I haven't seen a Spanish version), is from 1971. A new 2012 translation of this collection (by Ilan Stavans, with two additional stories) rendered the title as The Plain in Flames, a closer translation of the Spanish title, El Llano en Llamas. When I'm ready for a re-read, I'll try to find a copy of that one. In the meantime, this collection of stories was well worth reading, strongly painting the soul of Mexico. [4★]