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Netflix adapts Pedro Páramo, the great Mexican novel that inspired Márquez

New film of Juan Rulfo’s novel, revered as founding text of magic realism, is first film adaptation in half a century

“This country, where Death is written with a capital letter because it defines us in an inexorable way, at times brutal and at others poetic, has not found a more powerful metaphor than the story of Pedro Páramo,” wrote the Mexican novelist Alma Delia Murillo in an ecstatic review of the new film. The story is set in the decades around the Mexican revolution, more than 100 years ago, and those first words are uttered by Juan Preciado, who has travelled to the town of Comala to fulfil a promise made to his dying mother that he would claim the money owed to him by his father, who is a kind of feudal lord. The echoes of Pedro Páramo in One Hundred Years of Solitude are clear, from the seared imprints of their opening lines and the themes of political violence and powerful families to the mythical aspect of their isolated towns, Comala and Macondo.

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