In accordance with our meta agreement to have topic challenges and a later meta agreement to have topic challenges lasting for two months and overlapping by one month, it is today time to announce the December 2024 – January 2025 topic challenge.
Based on the number of votes (+4/-0), the unique topic challenge straddling 2024 and 2025 will be:
Juan Rulfo
What's a topic challenge?
See the meta posts linked above, and also this main meta post. In short, during December and January you are invited to try to read at least one work by Juan Rulfo and ask questions about it.
Participation is not obligatory in any sense, and questions on other works are more than welcome during December and January too; they just won't count as part of this topic challenge.
How can I take part?
By getting hold of some Juan Rulfo literature and
- asking good questions about it or
- answering questions that have been posted as part of this challenge or
- writing a review of the book on our Tumblr blog.
Questions about these works should be tagged with juan-rulfo and spanish-language and other tags as appropriate (either a novel tag or short-stories). We'll keep a list of all such questions in an answer to this meta post.
Tsundoku's presentation of the topic is as follows:
The Mexican author Juan Rulfo published only three works of literature during his lifetime: the short-story collection El Llano en llamas (1953),the novel Pedro Páramo (1955) and the novella El gallo de oro (1980). In spite of this modest output and the cool critical reception of Pedro Páramo, Gabriel García Márquez considered him a major influence on his own work. Márquez said Pedro Páramo was the most beautiful novel of his hemisphere. Borges considered the novel one of the greatest texts in any language.
Notes about online availability:
- El Llano en llamas is available in both the original Spanish and to borrow from the Internet Archive in an English translation by George D. Schade as The Burning Plain and Other Stories.
- Pedro Páramo is available in both the original Spanish (on the Mexican government's website!) and in an English translation by Margaret Sayers Peden.
- El gallo de oro is available in both the original Spanish and to borrow from the Internet Archive in an English translation by Douglas J. Weatherford as The Golden Cockerel & Other Writings.
What's next?
- Vote for the next topic challenge (January–February), or propose your own topic!
- Feel free to edit links into this post if you find some good online resources related to the works of Juan Rulfo.
