But even this Ariadne's thread doesn't turn Pedro Páramo into a straightforward narrative of a cacique's life and times. Originally Rulfo planned to call the novel Los murmullos (The Murmurs)--appropriately enough, as much of the text consists of whispered bits of gossip, rumors and confessions. Rulfo's whispers are masterpieces. They're aural brush strokes, depicting the times with deft economy. A few scant sentences suffice to sum up classes and customs, characters and situations: He's a verbal Velázquez. But unlike Velázquez, Rulfo never shows us the finished canvas. We get a part, and again a part, and again a part; the reader must complete the picture.

Like murmurs, the novel has an astonishing acoustic quality; its dialogues and interior monologues feel improvised, as if the author let the characters speak on their own, like actors in a Cassavetes movie. The text's popular expressions, colloquialisms, idioms, sayings and proverbs give it an authentic lightness, a regional flavor, a very Mexican and picaresque salsita. (Unfortunately, neither of the English translations fully captures this taste and variety.)

Pedro Páramo may be provincial, but it is also profound, at once rural and cosmopolitan. Free of pretentious "literary" verbiage, it draws on its era's Modernist currents, including the Surrealism of Octavio Paz and his group, while at the same time absorbing the approach of the European and Mexican folktale tellers Rulfo admired. (A voracious reader, he was especially fond of Knut Hamsun, Jens Peter Jacobsen, Selma Lagerlöf and Halldór Laxness, not to mention Americans like Melville, Twain, Hawthorne, Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell; he also may have been influenced by his work translating African-American spirituals.) Despite its mixed parentage--half Modernist, half folkish--and for all its gaps and jumps, his novel is a jewel of narrative fluidity.

Innumerable interpretations have been spun about Pedro Páramo. It has been said to represent, embody, allegorize or illuminate: the times of Porfirio Díaz's dictatorship, the social context of the Revolution, patriarchal rancher culture and the repression of women, the poetic qualities of rural speech, Mexico's relationship with death, the lingering influence on Mexicans of Aztec cosmology, Mexican deruralization and the ghost towns it created, Mexican culture, Mexican history, Mexican modernity, universal myths and archetypes. All of these interpretations are right, except those asserting that they alone are right. For me, the novel is about the Novel: the wonders of storytelling, the power of the literary word that spins so fast it never lets the reader catch it.

Antonio Alatorre has suggested that his friend Rulfo "always had the habit of lying. I don't know why he liked that, throwing everyone off track." Arreola is, to be sure, an imaginative sort himself; he says of Rulfo that "sometimes, when I was carrying on a conversation with him, I had the impression that we were both lying, but that we both agreed to do so."

Indeed, many stories about Rulfo's life are in dispute. He changed the year and place of his birth; soft-pedaled his stay in the orphanage; said he never attended the seminary; denied ever having read Faulkner (annoyed by the claim, in the first thesis written about his book, that Faulkner had influenced him). And then there was the case of his grandfather's thumbs. The author liked to tell friends and interviewers that his grandfather had been among those tortured by Pedro Zamora, a bandolero--more like a pseudo-revolutionary--who terrorized Jalisco, hanging the rich by their thumbs until they confessed where they'd hidden their money. Rulfo claimed that in this manner Zamora had relieved his grandfather of 50,000 pesos and two thumbs. But when the historian Federico Munguía Cárdenas asked Juan's older brother, Severiano, about the incident, he replied that Juan's tale of the tortured grandfather was "puro cuento" (mere lies).

The accounts of the birth of Pedro Páramo also vary. According to one version, Rulfo had typed out a pile of pages on his Remington Rand but then found himself unable to arrange the fragments into a sequential manuscript--to assemble the shards into a pot--and he asked Arreola to help him put the material in "order" (though order is not the word that springs to mind in characterizing the work). Arreola has written that Rulfo was so discouraged he had actually torn up some pages and tossed them in the garbage. But he reports, also, that the order proved easy to find, especially as Rulfo had been in no doubt about which material would constitute the ending. And while Antonio Alatorre, Rulfo's other close friend from those days, confirms Arreola's version, there are scholars and others who say it isn't true. More to the point, Rulfo himself never acknowledged Arreola's help.

The particulars of the author's myriad misrepresentations--whether or not, as an obscure bureaucrat in the 1940s, he took charge of crew members captured from Italian and German oil tankers, when the enemy ships were in fact impounded on the other side of the country--are not of great moment; they may, however, provide some insight into his literary persona. Rulfo is not the kind of writer who proceeds in a journalistic or historical way. His always elusive prose is not given to calm observation, factual rendering or realistic description. (Even his name, Juan Rulfo, is invented: he was born Juan Nepomuceno Pérez Vizcaíno.) Hiding stories is how he reveals them; it's his way of being forthcoming. He repeatedly crisscrosses the boundaries between memory and reality. It's not that he embraces a literature of the fantastic: His characters don't fly, it doesn't rain upside down. But his pen is less a recording tool than a magic wand.

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