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Although he wrote few works in his lifetime, namely a thin volume of short stories (The Burning Plain and Other Stories) and a single novel, the name of Juan Rulfo is well respected in Latin American letters. His novel, Pedro Páramo (1955) broke from the traditional realist novel and with its unique narrative ushered in magical realism, popularised in the Latin American Boom by the likes of Gabriel García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes.

Why he only wrote one novel - he died in 1986 - will perhaps remain unknown, however Susan Sontag, in her introduction, takes a guess, observing that “the point of a writer’s life is to produce a great book - a book which will last - and that is what Rulfo did.” A small body of work is of course no barrier to greatness, with Rulfo being named, following a poll conducted by Editorial Alfaguara, alongside Jorge Luis Borges as the best Spanish-language writer of the 20th Century.

It begins with the narrator, Juan Preciado, heading to his mother’s home town of Comala, because his father, Pedro Páramo, lives there. Long before, not long after their marriage, Pedro Páramo had sent Preciado’s mother away to live with her sister. Now, on her deathbed, she makes a final request: “Make him pay, son, for all those years he put us out of his mind.”

To his mother’s mind, Comala is a boon for nostalgia. In his head echoes of her memories stir, talking of “a beautiful view of a green plain tinged with the yellow of ripe corn” and “the savor of orange blossoms in the warmth of summer.” However, on the road down to the town, Preciado meets a man, claiming also to be a son of Pedro Páramo, who says,

“That town sits on the coals of the earth, at the very mouth of hell. They say that when people from there die and go to hell, they come back for a blanket.”

In Comala, things take a turn for the strange. Preciado meets a woman, Eduviges Dyada, who claims that she hasn’t had much time to prepare for him as his mother, despite dying a week before, had only just informed her of his trip. From here we begin to see just how far Rulfo’s novel meanders from the traditional structure as the narrative begins to play host to other, seemingly unrelated stories. Voices come and go, uncredited, and tenses change. Where first we were reading Preciado’s account, we find ourselves faced with a third person narrative.

More and more voices enter the fray, providing distilled snapshots, into a narrative that becomes disorientating. As the fragmented stories abound, they start to come together forming a patchwork that illustrates the people of Comala. Only, what makes it more interesting, is that they are all dead. All that remains is the essence of the people, each whispering their thoughts, secrets, and reliving moments over and over. Such is the force of all this trapped experience that when, halfway through the novel, Preciado announces his own death (”The murmuring killed me. I was trying to hold back my fear. But it kept building until I couldn’t contain it any longer. “) the book continues on, unraveling more and more.

“This town is filled with echoes. It’s like they were trapped behind the walls, or beneath the cobblestones. When you walk you feel like someone’s behind you, stepping on your footsteps. You hear rustlings. And people laughing. Laughter that sounds used up. And voices worn away by the years.”

The main thread of the novel is the titular, Pedro Páramo. “Living bile”, as the stranger Preciado meets at the start labels him.  Páramo is the son of a rancher who, after his father’s death, “flourished like a weed”. Considered a lost cause by his father, Páramo became an opportunist, stealing land from others and populating it through the rape of the woman working his land. Indeed,  Páramo’s marriage to Preciado’s mother only came about as she was his largest creditor - after the wedding properties were made out in both names.

Páramo’s story is the most linear within the novel, weaving in and out of his rise from hopeless child to vengeful old man. In creating such a vile character it’s easy to make him completely evil and deny him his humanity, and Rulfo ensure’s no moralising over the man’s actions here. In fact, to balance his ruthless nature we are regularly shown the unrequited love he feels for Susana San Juan, who even in marriage never loves him.

He had thought he knew her. But even when he found he didn’t, wasn’t it enough to know that she was the person he loved most on this earth? And - and this was what mattered most - that because of her he would leave this earth illuminated by the image that erased all other memories.

But what world was Susana San Juan living in? That was one of the things that Pedro Páramo would never know.

One of the biggest achievements Rulfo manages with Pedro Páramo is that such a slight volume can feel so epic. Years come and go in whispers, the story dancing back and forward between them. From the Mexican Revolution through the Cristiada we see lives lived and torn apart. As readers we are encouraged to fill in the blanks and join the dots of the story, a task that doesn’t come easily, thanks to the scattered narrative, the first time round, but is more than cemented with a second reading. There’s probably more in a third and fourth reading - who knows what in a fifth.

As one character, oblivious to their own revenant state, notes early on:

‘Nights around here are filled with ghosts. You should see all the spirits walking through the streets. As soon as it’s dark they begin to come out. No one likes to see them. There’s so many of them and so few of us that we don’t even make the effort to pray for them anymore, to help them out of their purgatory. We don’t have enough prayers to go around.’

You should see all the spirits walking through the streets. It’s a good thing novels are not prayers, as Pedro Páramo is one that needs to go around.

If you are tired of Indian novels built on a blend of saffron and saris then Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008) may just be the antidote required. It’s take on modern India is one more grounded in reality than romantic idealism, straddling the thin line between the historical hangovers of British rule and ingrained caste system with the thriving industry of entrepreneurship now prevalent in outsourced business, such as information technology and call centres.

One such entrepreneur is Balram Halwai, “Bangalore’s least known success story”, from a caste of sweet-makers, who wants to share the story of his personal struggle. Interestingly, he has decided to share it with Wen Jiabao, Premier of “the Freedom-Loving Nation of China” who, it is announced on the radio, is coming to Bangalore in the next week. Rather than the falsity of handshakes and namastes between political leaders, Balram opts to show India warts and all through a series of lengthy letters.

Balram’s path to entrepreneurship, as he tells Wen Jiabao near the beginning, has begun by slitting his master’s throat. His master, incidentally, is one of the four landlords who run the area around Laxmangarh, known as the Animals. (”…the Animals stayed and fed on the village, and everything that grew in it, until there was nothing left for anyone else to feed on.”) As a driver in the service of the Stork and his sons, Balram picks up snippets of information he hears both at home and behind the wheel. And it’s the rise from teashop boy to modern Indian man (via murderer) that is recounted for the benefit of the Chinese Premier. (”…sir, you are far ahead of us in every respect, except that you don’t have entrepreneurs.”)

What has allowed Balram the audicity to speak are the changes in India. Many years before, the country was like a zoo, where people of certain castes were confined to their cage.

And then, thanks to all those politicians in Delhi, on the fifteenth of August, 1947 - the day the British left - the cages had been let open; and the animals had attacked and ripped each other apart and jungle law replaced zoo law. Those that were the most ferocious, the hungriest, had eaten everyone else up, and grown big bellies. That was all that counted now, the size of your belly. It didn’t matter whether you were a woman, or a Muslim, or an untouchable: anyone with a belly could rise up.

But, for all those that don’t rise up, there’s the millions left in the Darkness, of which Balram’s home of Laxmangarh is “a typical Indian village paradise”:

Electricity poles - defunct.

Water tap - broken.

Children - too lean and short for their age, and with oversized heads from which vivid eyes shine, like the guilty conscience of the government of India.

Balram’s chances of escaping such poverty don’t look so good, his family having taken him out of school and putting him to work in a teashop.

Go to a teashop anywhere along the Ganga, sir, and look at the men working in that tea shop - men I say, but better to call them human spiders that go crawling in between and under the tables with rags in their hands, crushed humans in crushed uniforms, sluggish, unshaven, in their thirties or forties or fifties but still ‘boys’. But that is your fate if you do your job well - with honesty, dedication, and sincerity, the way Ghandi would have done it, no doubt.

If doing your job well means enduring it for life, Balram proves himself to be, as a school inspector once noted, “the rarest of animals - the creature that comes along only once in a generation” - a white tiger. Rather than live a life at the bottom, Balram takes fate into his own hands and takes a different path to Ghandi’s, because only with dishonesty and insincerity can you plot to reach for higher grounds. (”…the Indian entrepreneur has to be straight and crooked, mocking and believing, sly and sincere, at the same time.”)

What is good about Balram’s letters are his ignorance of the man and the country he is addressing (”Now, since I doubt that you have rickshaw-pullers in China - or in any other civilised nation on earth - you will have to see one for yourself.”), having picked up his knowledge from a book entitled Exciting Tales of the Exotic East. This is indicative of the nature of entrepreneurs, who are “made from half-baked clay”:

Me, and thousands of others in this country like me, are half-baked, because we were never allowed to complete our schooling. Open our skulls, look in with a penlight, and you’ll find an odd museum of ideas: sentences of history or mathematics remembered from school textbooks…sentences about politics read in a newspaper…bits of All India Radio news bulletins…all these ideas, half formed and half digested and half correct, mix up with other half-cooked ideas in your head, and I guess these half-formed ideas bugger one another, and make more half-formed ideas, and this is what you act on and live with.

In the telling, The White Tiger is reminiscent of last year’s Booker nominated The Reluctant Fundamentalist, give that we are left to wonder at Wen Jiabao’s reaction to Balram’s letters, assuming he even gets them. And in it’s getting down and dirty with the downtrodden of India, and sparks of east meets west, there’s a dotted line to be drawn to Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People, although the book that springs to mind most is Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains Of The Day, purely for the parallel of a man, his master, and the oblivion between.

Its players, being drawn from the the top to bottom of Indian society, are tight in scope, allowing Adiga to get to grips well with them and how they interact with each other, whether it be the relationships between master and servant, between family members, or between the state and civilians. In all, The White Tiger provides an evocative and miserable landscape stripped of any exoticism one might expect, where everyone is greasing the palms of others, and anyone with the stomach for it can make their mark. And being easily digestible, your own stomach need not worry, for the novel is anything but half-baked.

When it comes to reputations, Ismail Kadare’s is one that certainly precedes him. Having come from nowhere (well, I hadn’t heard of him, at least) to scoop the inaugural MAN Booker International Prize in 2005, his works have steadily appeared in larger scales on book shop shelves. A couple of years back I sampled one of his books at random - Spring Flowers, Spring Frost, if you must know - and didn’t feel I got much out of it, which I put down to my own cultural ignorance.

That same ignorance showed up again when I read his novella, Agamemnon’s Daughter (1985), and I found myself plodding through page after page unengaged. And then the ending came along, with its explosive epiphany, and, tying everything together, hit the mark. It was just a pity I didn’t really see how it had come to this. So, after a bit of research on the subject matter I decided to read the story again and this time round everything fell into place. Or fell into step, as the cover nicely implies.

Beginning with an unnamed narrator patiently awaiting his lover we enter into 1980s Albania, a country so staunchly sticking to Marxist-Leninist ideals that even the Soviet world around it has left it behind and China is its only ally. Such are the sacrifices for sticking to one’s guns. And sacrifice is precisely what Agamemnon’s Daughter is all about, the narrator analogising his current situatution with that of Iphigenia, sacrificed by her father in order to bring the wind so that the Aechaean fleet could sail.

The sacrifice of the story’s events concerns the narrator’s lover, Suzana, giving him up for her father’s career:

It was getting harder and harder for her to see me, she said. Papa’s career was on the rise…Their family was more than ever in the limelight…Two weeks before, at the last plenum of the Central Committee, Papa had gone up another rung…So it was obvious she would have to make changes to her way of life, to her wardrobe, to the people she saw. Otherwise she might hurt his career.

To soften the blow, the narrator has been invited to the grandstand for the May Day celebrations. It’s a privilege that others wish upon themselves, so to receive such a calling evokes jealousy and disbelief:

It was the first time I had been entitled to sit in the grandstand at the May Day parade, and I still could not quite believe that it was my own name written on the card. When I first received it, the Party secretary seemed as stunned as I was. It wouldn’t be fair to say that the only emotion in his eyes was that of envy: there was also stupefaction.

It’s the journey to the grandstand and the ultimate understanding of the Agamemnon analogy that move the book along. While not much action can be said to happen in the present, Kadare uses the man’s journey to criticise Albania and its policies. To do so he uses layers of myth that strengthen the narrative, recounting incidents about the absurdity of the Socialist agenda as characters are spotted amongst the May Day crowds.

It’s the loss of Suzanna, though, that continues to bring the narrator back to the idea of Iphigenia and of sacrifice. He resigns the idea that maybe he is stretching it, pushing the notion too far:

I’d got hold of the word sacrifice and then used it to contrive an analogy I’d taken further than was warranted. I was no better than a novice poet who manages after much effort to spawn a metaphor, then falls for it entirely and constructs an entire poetic work on a foundation no more solid than sand.

But, come the end, the sacrifice is certainly there but the offering is not what he thought.

Bundled with Agamemnon’s Daughter are a further two stories that also take sacrifice as their theme. While neither of these are as interesting as the title story, or carry the same level of depth. Of the two, The Blinding Order, set during the Ottoman Empire’s reorganisation, is the stronger piece, delivering a story that is, on the surface, absurd but equally frightening. Closing off the collection, The Great Wall tells the story of China from both sides, and while the analogies are interesting, the story is the weakest aspect.

While it’s good piece of literature I daresay it would be hard to enjoy the story of Agamemnon’s Daughter, for its tone never truly excites. What it does do, though, is provide an interesting insight into the world of Albania, the people stifled and oppressed by its politics. A suitable example of such would be the book itself which, due to its criticism of Albania, had to be smuggled out of the country a few pages at a time. Unfortunately, the translation is from French rather than Albanian and so there’s a sense that, with the story having been through the wringer twice, some of the translation has echoes of the French.

But the language is still engaging and once in line with Kadare’s writing, curiousity drives the reader on. It’s an absorbing read - and there’s plenty to absorb - as we follow one man’s journey in an oppressed nation where the will to survive, no matter how hard it becomes, wins through. So four Marx out of five and, in the spirit of socialism, everyone should read it.

There is nothing original in the idea of what a person would do if they learned the scope of their finite lives. Invariably they make lists of things they haven’t seen, things they haven’t done, people to say their farewells to, and, if time permits, share a hand in planning the funeral. In this conceit, Andrey Kurkov’s A Matter Of Death And Life (1996, translated 2005) is nothing new (the situation arose on this blog in Quim Monzó’s The Enormity Of The Tragedy) but, rather than a terminal illness forcing tidy conclusions to his mortality, Tolya, the novel’s narrator, has decided to take matters into his own hands.

In post-Soviet Kiev, law and order has taken a back seat allowing the shadow of corruption to conceal the dodgy deals masquerading as business. This is a Kiev where “any kind of relationship is for sale”, life cheapened by the lack of opportunity, rendered useless. With nothing to live for, Tolya decides that the only way out is to hire a contract killer:

For years, in imagination and fantasy, I had been seeking some way out of my dead-end situation in life. And here, on a plate, it was - out of the dead end and of life itself. Too fond of life ever to take my own, I was made for the role of victim.

Such a drastic decision is arrived at because his marriage is falling apart and, as far as employment goes, Tolya finds himself drifting aimlessly from job to job. To be offed in such curious circumstances would place gravity upon him, make him someone people talked about, preserve his legend:

The idea of an effective end to my senseless life was alluring. One engaging feature of mysterious killings is how often they get referred to in the press and in books, along with names and details, affording a fair chance of survival in the popular memory.

Luckily his friend Dima has connections in the murky underworld, willing to do business for a paltry sum, and the plan is set in motion. Under the pretence of killing the lover of his wife, Tolya slips his own photograph and routine into the hitman’s dossier. But, after a brief dalliance with a prostitute - another unoriginality: the hooker with a heart of gold - Tolya finds himself preferring to embrace life after all. So, with a hitman looking to take him out, Tolya decides that the only logical step is to take out another contract.

It’s a light farce for the most part, only acquiring a bit of weight when Tolya steps into the aftermath of his actions, forming a bond with the wife of the first hitman who, without her husband, is equally lost. But the gravitas is not enough to balance the scales and, despite all of Tolya’s philosophising, and the seriousness of life in this impoverished Kiev, A Matter Of Death And Life is little more than a romp.

As a romp, however, it’s enjoyable and a whizz to read, breezing along with a fair mix of action and internalising, funny and captivating all the way, even at its most melancholy. And Kurkov does just the right thing by keeping the novel slight, at just over 110 pages. Any more and it would have become aimless, necessitating its own contract killing.

When it comes to choosing a book there are all manner of things that can - and do - influence my choices. An interesting cover is one such way to grab my attention, as is an alluring title. And then there’s the matter of my ongoing mission to discover new writers. Of those three, Arto Paasilinna’s The Howling Miller (1981) ticks each box - and so it was a dead cert to be read. And the sooner the better.

Set in post-war Finland, a man named Gunnar Huttunen (”as lean as he was tall”) arrives in a rural village and takes control of the local mill, rundown due to the war, and restores it to past glories. For this the villagers are happy to have him and, of an evening, he proves great company with his ability to mimic animals - cranes, bears, elks - but this all changes when, prone to mood swings, he finds a release in howling “from dusk until the early hours and, if it were carried on the wind, every dog for miles around would answer his desolate cry.”

And this is just the opening pages, to which the villagers react by deciding that, since he won’t conform with their wishes, he must be mad. It’s not long, then, before the local doctor has officially certified him and he’s transferred to “the loony bin” from which, with the help of an inmate, he soon escapes. What then plays out is an extraordinary conflict between Huttunen and the people of the village as they try to out him from the woods in which he hides in order to return him to the asylum. As the hunt for Huttenun escalates in scale, all he has to side with him are the local postman - also the local drunk - and Sanelma Käyrämö, his girlfriend who, because of his madness, isn’t quite willing to settle down lest they “have a baby, the mad child of a mad man.”

It’s a riotous novel, full of deadpan humour told in a comic style that, as the opening paragraph suggests, comes across like a fable, throwing in some period references:

Soon after the wars, a tall fellow appeared in the canton who said his name was Gunnar Huttunen. unlike most of the drifters who came up from the south, he didn’t go to the forestry department looking for work digging ditches, but bought the old mill on the Suukoski rapids of the Kemijoki River. This was judged to be a hare-brained scheme, since, having stood idle since the 1930s, the mill had fallen into a state of extreme dilapidation.

If I were to have any complaint of The Howling Miller it’s only that the translation felt adequate and nothing more, coming as it did from Finnish via a French translation, an approach I felt similarly lacking in Ismail Kadare’s Spring Flowers, Spring Frost. There’s always that sense something gets lost in translation, but one wonders what gets lost in translation of the translation. Certainly not the humour or the tone, in this case. But Paasilinna’s other novel currently translated to English, The Year Of The Hare is direct from Finnish. So why not this?

But that’s a small grumble as the gist of the novel is still there and it’s enjoyable, maintaining interest all the way through, the narrative never waning, as it winds its way through themes of persecution, corruption, and madness with more subtle content concerning agrarian principles, demonstrating Paasilinna’s seeming love of nature. The Howling Miller, as a read, has worthwhile concerns to explore but here there are no answers - or attempts to assert opinion - here; just a straightforward tale that may just have you howling too.

Novels from India are something that seem to make their way to my shelves but never get read (a few examples being Arundhati Roy’s The God Of Small Things, Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, and last year’s Booker winner, The Inheritance Of Loss by Kiran Desai). So, going ahead with my intent to read all thirteen books longlisted for the Booker this year, Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People was one Indian novel that wasn’t destined for indefinite shelving.

And for that happy I’m, as its narrator may say. Yes, such contortions are normal in Animal’s speech. They are a fitting parallel, for Animal’s body is physically twisted, forcing him to walk on all fours after “That Night” when the local factory exploded, its toxins killing thousands, harming many more, and polluting the elements. Although the novel is set in a fictional city called Khaufpur, it’s plain to see that it’s basis is in Bhopal, the explosion being a riff on the 1984 disaster.

Telling his story into a “tape mashin” left by an Australian reporter, Animal describes his life in Khaufpur. When he’s not scamming or drinking chai, he’s fancying himself a bit of a James Bond (”namispond jamispond”) in the spying stakes, which typically involves climbing up trees and perving on Nisha, his friend. It’s the delivery that makes Animal’s People special. For, aforementioned syntax aside, Animal is crude, comic, and at ease with his disability. His narrative practically sings off the page as he tells of his life, trades insults with his friends, and makes observations, passes judgement:

The world of humans is meant to be viewed from eye level. Your eyes. Lift my head I’m staring into someones crotch. Whole nother world it’s, below the waist. Believe me, I know which one hasn’t washed his balls, I can smell pissy gussets and shitty backsides whose faint stenches don’t carry to your nose, farts smell extra bad. In my mad times I’d shout at people in the street, “Listen, however fucking miserable you are, and no one’s as happy as they’ve a right to be, at least you stand on two feet!”

In the poverty stricken community where Animal lives, everyone has been affected by the negligence of the “Kampani”, and the main reason for living is to see it brought to justice, to see compensation paid to all affected. Of course, life here is unstructured, politicians are corrupt - the same old sorry story drags from one day to the next. And then, into the community comes Elli Barber, an “Amrikan doctress”, who opens a clinic offering free healthcare to all who need it. But the people are suspicious, for she may just be working for the Kampani, here to prove that they are not to blame.

Given the length of Animal’s People it’s testament to Sinha’s ability that he was able to maintain the unique voice although I did perhaps feel there were a few slips where, after being charmed by Animal, the story would briefly lose his likeable style. Toward the end, after following Animal for so long I felt myself wanting it all to be over; the closing chapters almost read as evidence Sinha was thinking the same, tying up the loose ends.

But overall, Animal’s People is a real achievement. While on the surface it follows one man’s journey in understanding his humanity, its concerns are greater in scope, using Animal to focus on issues such as poverty, religion, and corruption without being didactic. Given that not a peep was heard in the British press, its Booker longlisting will no doubt bring Animal’s People the attention it deserves. But, more importantly than literature, its content can bring about an awareness of the real disaster in 1984, the effects of which are still felt today amongst the real Animal’s people.