The Golden Cockerel & Other Writings

The story of one man’s changing fortunes in a semimythical Mexico anchors this captivating, occasionally haphazard collection of Rulfo’s (Pedro Paramo) short stories, letters, and fragments. In the titular short novel, impoverished town crier Dionisio Pinzon leaves his hometown of San Miguel del Milagro to try his luck in the cockfights, carrying a golden cockerel he has nursed back to life. The brave, beloved cockerel is soon defeated, but Pinzon’s luck takes a turn when he meets the traveling singer called La Caponera: a confident, hard-drinking woman who becomes the key to his increasing wealth. The rituals of cockfighting are richly described in “The Golden Cockerel,” and other texts offer similarly intriguing combinations of the highly specific and the archetypal. A prostitute takes a long a walk with a gravedigger and someone else’s child in “A Piece of the Night”; a nameless guide speaks of the old gods to a pair of travelers in Veracruz in “Castillo de Teayo.” Death is the focus of several darker selections, like “My Father,” “My Aunt Cecilia,” and “Cleotilde,” in which the narrator addresses the corpse of his murdered wife. Although many of these fragments are without context, Rulfo’s memorable images, like a man who “fled town amid a shower of screams, but with the ‘38 super’ still in his hand... his finger dripping as it remained clenched on the trigger” help to fill out the oeuvre of an important Mexican writer. (May)