Pedro Paramo (Wittliff Gallery Series)

Pedro Paramo (Wittliff Gallery Series) by Josephine Sacabo. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780292771215.

Winner, Fred Whitehead Award for the Best Design of a Trade Book from Texas Institute of Letters Western Books Exhibition Selection, Rounce & Coffin Club, 2003 Deserted villages of rural Mexico, where images and memories of the past linger like unquiet ghosts, haunted the imaginations of two artists—writer Juan Rulfo and photographer Josephine Sacabo. In one such village of the mind, Comala, Rulfo set his classic novel Pedro Páramo, a dream-like tale that intertwines a mans quest to find his lost father and reclaim his patrimony with the fathers obsessive love for a woman who will not be possessed—Susana San Juan. Recognizing that "Rulfo was describing a world I already knew" and feeling "a very personal response, particularly to Susana San Juan and her dilemma," Josephine Sacabo used Rulfos novel as the starting point for a series of evocative photographs she calls "The Unreachable World of Susana San Juan: Homage to Juan Rulfo." This volume brings together Rulfos novel and Sacabos photographs to offer a dual artistic vision of the same unforgettable story. Margaret Sayers Pedens superb translation renders the novel as poetic and mysterious in English as it is in Spanish. Josephine Sacabos photographs tell, in her words, "the story of a woman forced to take refuge in madness as a means of protecting her inner world from the ravages of the forces around her: a cruel and tyrannical patriarchy, a church that offers no redemption, the senseless violence of revolution, death itself."