I did not like it. I tried to be open-minded but I could not contain my frustration. First of all, I cannot get behind the stylistic choices of the autI did not like it. I tried to be open-minded but I could not contain my frustration. First of all, I cannot get behind the stylistic choices of the author. The way she chose to tell the story was really grinding on my nerves. Despite being around 300 pages, nothing really happens, at least not on-page because there are constant mentions about stuff that *happened* somewhere at some earlier point but we hardly ever see it. We instead spend most of the time reading about how people stand around and emote. Like I kid you not there *pages* of characters just going through an array of different emotions provoked by seemingly nothing since it is written from the perspective of the city(?) so we don't enter the characters' heads and so their motivations or feelings are never clear. This makes it so goddamn annoying to read. The second thing is the one that makes me even more frustrated. The women have no impact on the plot despite being a central part of it, let me explain. We spend a lot of time with sex workers and village women, having them at the backdrop of a scene, but they never take any active role in it. They only ever passively comply with whatever the male characters are imposing on them, to the point that when one of them does technically make a decision for herself (bc again it is in reaction to what the male character proposed, but she has the last word ig) it makes little sense to the reader since we had no chance to measure her personality before that point and the thing she decides on is in opposition to common sense tbh. I'm just pissed thinking about it so I'll end this rant here....more
An interesting read but it takes some work to get through not only because of its fragmented structure but also because of its disregard for the timelAn interesting read but it takes some work to get through not only because of its fragmented structure but also because of its disregard for the timeline of the events. All to present the absence of time/cyclical nature of time in the city of Comala. To add to it all we are constantly shifting perspectives and the majority of the info we are privy to we gather from dialogue (which sometimes we have to guess the participants of). All of this serves to present the titular Pedro Páramo through the eyes of those whose lives he dominated. It's riveting to see the archetypes from various myths from both Greek and evangelical canon used to maintain the feel of a space outside of time....more
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