The Burning Plain

Weatherford’s fresh new translation of this seminal 1953 collection from Mexican writer Rulfo (1917–1986) lays bare the enigmatic potency of its stories about love, poverty, and violence. In “Talpa,” the narrator returns home alone after fulfilling his sick brother’s wish to receive a miracle cure in the eponymous town, despite knowing his brother would never survive the journey. In “The Man,” an unnamed protagonist is following someone, but he is also being followed. Later, the reader learns the protagonist is on the run after massacring a family. As characters trek across vast and arduous desert terrain, it can be hard to distinguish the real from the imaginary, which adds to the book’s power. Rulfo makes effective use of confessional, first-person narrators, whose admissions of wrongdoing are proffered with a shocking nonchalance, as in “La Cuesta de les Comadres,” whose protagonist admits to killing his good friend. Despite the economic prose style, Rulfo doesn’t eschew metaphorical lyricism, as in “Talpa,” where the narrator reflects on being swept up by the crowd descending onto the town (“Never had I felt life to be so leaden and violent as it was while walking among that swarm of people, as if we were a knot of worms writhing under the sun”). This will please Rulfo’s devotees and earn him new ones. (Sept.)