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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.

Colombia has, for some time now, been plagued by all manner of violence, starting with La Violencia in the late forties, through the rise of guerilla groups, and continuing to this day with the sprawling narcotics industry. Sixty years of bloodshed, naturally, will hang heavy on the national consciousness, and it’s this that Evelio Rosero turns to in his novel, The Armies (2007), which won the Premio Tusquets Editories de Novela in 2006. (The book came out in Spanish after the prize was won, in case you’re wondering.)

It’s little surprise that, with a novel built around a situation notorious for the gross violation of human rights that the book should come recommended by PEN. The recommendation is not a one off, as they’ve recently been supporting a number of translated titles which in some way reflect the PEN Charter. It’s a worthy cause, freedom of speech, and in The Armies Rosero gives a voice to those caught up in a turmoil not of their making, who have no voice.

Ismael is a seventy year old man, a retired teacher, living in the sunny mountain town of San José with his wife, Otilia. There’s not much to his days, now that he’s retired. He feeds the fish, takes walks, and climbs the ladder to pick from the orange tree as a subterfuge to spying on his neighbour’s wife, something which his wife tells him he should at least try and be subtle about. All in all, the pace Rosero opens his novel with is an enjoyable, breezy read, where you just want to take your time and admire the view:

The Brazilian’s wife, the slender Geraldina, sought out the heat on her terrace, completely naked, lying face down on the red floral quilt. At her side, in the refreshing shade of a ceiba tree, the Brazilian’s enormous hands roved astutely along his guitar, and his voice rose, placid and persistent, between the sweet laughter of the macaws; this is how the hours proceeded on their terrace, amid sunlight and music.

While San José sounds almost paradisial, there are hints that all is not well with the world. Explosions and gunshots are heard, first far off, then nearer. Rosero casually mentions coca fields located near the town, which clue the reader in to the proximity of the drug trafficking trade, and by proxy the guerrillas who fund themselves through it. People disappear, sometimes never to be heard of again. Despite all these intrusions on daily life, the author deals not with the people who threaten the village but how the lives of those resident are affected, not just in San José, but all over Colombia:

Years ago, before the attack on the church, displaced people from other towns used to pass through our town; we used to see them crossing the highway, interminable lines of men and children and women, silent crowds with neither bread nor destinations. Years ago, three thousand indigenous people stayed for a long while in San José, but eventually had to leave due to extreme food shortages in the improvised shelters.

Now it is our turn.

While the majority of the population flees, Ismail stays. His wife has gone missing and, having nothing to live for, sees no reason to run. He spends the time looking for her, asking people returning with ransom notices if she was with the taken. Added to his desperation is the fact his age is not so much creeping up on him but gaining: his memory is not what it used to be, he finds himself more and more confused by events going on around him. Sadly, the confusion that Rosero generates in the character transfers to the reader. Not the understanding of the man’s increasing disorientation, but actual confusion brought about by vague passages the book sometimes becomes guilty of. At times like this Ismail’s narration never runs as deep as it could, never quite giving a good account of his inner turmoil, and leaving the surface with few tangible scratches.

There are occasions when being vague works. The title, for example. San José represents any old town in Colombia, its streets home to the full set of stock trades: the doctor, the priest, the pastry seller. From time to time the towns find themselves the target of kidnappings, murders, rapes, and other atrocities. It’s so commonplace that the victimes don’t even know who their aggressors are this time. Are they guerrillas? Paramilitaries? Perhaps even the national armed forces? What makes it all the more shocking is the government’s attitude:

The contingents of soldiers, who while away their time in San José, for months, as if it were reborn peacetime, have been  considerably reduced. In any case, with them or without them the events of war will always loom, intensifies. If we see fewer soldiers, we are not informed of this in an official way; the only declaration from the authorities is that everything is under control; we hear it on the news - on small battery-operated radios, because we still have no electricity - we read it in the delayed newspapers; the President affirms that nothing is happening here, neither here nor anywhere in the country is there a war; according to him Otilia is not missing…and so many others of this town died of old age, and I laugh again, why do I laugh just when I discover that all I want to do is sleep without waking?

In The Armies Rosero does his nation a service, bringing the plight of its innocent people to the forefront of others’ imaginations. Issues of prolongued abduction, unnecessary murder, and child soldiers all brought under the spotlight. The biggest issue is in the telling, Ismail’s failing mind ultimately failing to wrench a huge roar back at the world, leaving him whimpering for the most part about how he’d rather be dead than alive. Surely there’s more to be said?

When the soldiers of whatever army to come down to San José they always come with a list of names.

Why do they ask for names? They kill whoever they please, no matter what their names might be. I would like to know what is written on the paper with the names, that “list”. It is a blank sheet of paper, for God’s sake. A paper where all the names they want can fit.

Between the lines of The Armies is a list of names, unprinted, and non-fictional. It’s an eye-opener of a book, and in this respect it’s certainly important. But the narration of Ismail, in his confusion, is quite capable of closing a few eyes too.

Ask me what my favourite film is and I’ll no doubt respond with Last Year In Marienbad (1961), written by Alain Robbe-Grillet and directed by Alain Resnais. Its appeal is that no matter how many times I watch it I am never wholly satisfied. Not because it’s a poor work - it isn’t; rather it doesn’t force answers into tidy resolutions and the viewer is left to ponder long after. And with each viewing a new avenue of possibilities opens up, answers always just out of reach.

It was news to me, however, that Last Year In Marienbad was inspired by a novel and more surprising that the work in question was a slim volume of Latin American science fiction. The Invention Of Morel (1940) by Argentinian writer, Adolfo Bioy Casares, who, it seems, lived in the literary shadow of countrymen and friend, Jorge Luis Borges. And with Borges providing a prologue (an introduction, really) it would appear he can’t even release a book without his friend casting that shadow.

The Invention Of Morel was Casares’ seventh novel and he believed it was the first true work of his literary career. In said prologue Borges states that “to classify it as perfect is neither an imprecision nor a hyperbole”. Octavio Paz echoed this when he said of the novel that it “may be described, without exaggeration, as a perfect novel.” With such heavyweights singing its praises and my own curiousity about how it inspired my favourite film I was eager to cast generic sci-fi prejudices aside and see just how perfect it was. As it turns out, rather close. But perfection in reading is subjective.

On the run from the police for a crime in his homeland, the narrator has wound up on a deserted island “known to be the focal point of a mysterious disease”. The novel forms his diary, the entries undated, from the moment when “a miracle” happens. That miracle is the arrival of other people to the island, people dressed as if “from another era”, who take up residence, having seemingly come from nowhere:

When I was finally able to sleep, it was very late. The music and the shouting woke me up a few hours later. I have not slept soundly since my escape; I am sure that if a ship, a plane, or any other form of transportation had arrived, I would have heard it. And yet suddenly, unaccountably, on this oppressive summerlike night, the grassy hillside has become crowded with people who dance, stroll up and down, and swim in the pool, as if this were a summer resort like Los Teques or Marienbad.

Fearing being turned in to the authorities, the narrator stays out of their way, but soon becomes attracted to one of their party, the beautiful Faustine, who he observes from a distance, falling, like Casares did for Louise Brooks, who graces the cover, into a love unrequited:

She watches the sunset every afternoon; from my hiding place I watch her. Yesterday, and again today, i discovered that my nights and days wait for this hour. The woman, with a gypsy’s sensuality and a large, bright-colored scarf on her head, is a ridiculous figure. But I still feel (perhaps I only half believe this) that if she looked at me for a moment, spoke to me only once, I would derive from those simple acts the sort of stimulus a man obtains from friends, from relatives, and, most of all, from the woman he loves.

As the days pass events become more mysterious. Two suns take to the sky, followed by two moons. The people of the island talk about the same things over and over again and the narrator becomes braver in his love for Faustine, daring to present himself only to be ignored.

The Morel of the title is a nod to H.G Wells’ The Island of Dr Moreau and, like his literary forebear, is an unscrupulous scientist. But that’s not what’s important to our narrator, for he belives that Faustine is using Morel - and the other islanders, as he gets to know them - to repudiate him. The invention of the title, however, is best left unmentioned as its revelation serves the story well in answering all of the novel’s mysteries before leading on to the beautiful, but unnerving, coda.

While much of the novel is written as fact within diary entries, there are occasions to dispute the reality. The reader is given pause to wonder if all of this is in the narrator’s mind. After all, the island does bask in severe warmth and it’s not outwith the realms of possibility that severe heat stroke could be causing hallucinations:

From the marshlands with their churning waters I can see the top of the hill, and the people who have taken up residence in the museum. I suppose someone might attriute their mysterious appearance to the effect of last night’s heat on my brain. But there are no hallucinations or imaginings here: I know these people are real - at least as real as I am.

Like Last Year In Marienbad, that’s the beauty of such a narrative and in rereading The Invention Of Morel early passages that inform later events or knowledge enhance the reading experience, all the while leaving dubiety about the conclusion. Each interpretation is possible, just as they dismiss one another.

As far as the perfection quoted by Borges and Paz goes, I can see where they are coming from as Casares has produced an immensely readable novel that is the sum of its parts, with nothing extraneous lurking in the narrative. As a mystery it’s engaging, and all the threads come together in an intricate weave with no frayed lines to tug on. I’d be loathe to call it perfect, however, especially since I’m reading it in translation. But as a novel it’s light on the science, and prefers to linger on themes of immortality and love, within a temporal puzzle, twisting them until they are all the better for it.

When I think of Finland, the impressions I get are twofold. The first, as should be obvious, is of a country covered with lakes and forests touching upon the Arctic circle, which was the case in Arto Paasilinna’s The Howling Miller. The second is of its darker side, of how it has one of the higher suicide rates in Europe and how bleak the impression it gives. During a recent browse of a book shop I happened across Dark Paradise (1989) by Rosa Liksom, a Finnish author, artist, and filmmaker, and on picking it up I’m happy to report that it falls into the latter camp and, rather than dwell on the darker side of Finland, it revels in it.

Dark Paradise is a collection of untitled short stories, most of which rarely stretch as far as four or five pages. They are split into two sections, Domestic and Foreign, and provide sketches of Finland’s dark underbelly, covering all manner of nefarious subjects, a mere sample of which includes murder, suicide, drugs, and sex abuse.

The stories tend to be told in the first person by unnamed narrators, a trick that offers out a multitide of voices ready to be claimed by the people of Finland who may sympathise in this or that direction, such as the militant:

I’m a sixth-generation nationalist, and proud of it. I’ve made it my mission to lead the country forward, to promote its traditions and ideologies, and I intend to do so at every opportunity. At school I tried to explain to my class that one day those goddamn Russians are going to come and stain red our blue-and-white flag, but something must be wrng with them, because they didn’t pay attention.

And when the rare third person story comes along, the prose continues with unnamed characters, always getting involved in the scene yet maintaining its distance:

The sun was shining behind the factory, coloring the water turquoise by the shore. A boy stood barefoot on the pier with a broom in his hands, squinting in the sunlight. On the pier there were chunks of meat being washed by small waves. The planks were sticky with blood, and white blubber floated on the edge of the shore in long strips. The boy felt small and dejected…He felt sad. All these ice-covered mountain, surrounded by water on every side, the sticky blood and stinking meat would be his fate, too. He would live only in order to lose his life.

The stories of Dark Paradise take place all over Finland, in is cities, fish factories, and churchyards; its bedrooms and prisons; and the tone remains icy throughout, as it brings, with a few broad strokes, the broken lives of its people. Where the Domestic section tends primarily to people’s inner turmoils, the Foreign stories explore when people collide. Amazingly, no matter what happens - shop keeper killed for small change, a rapist subverted, someone living with their dead mother - there’s the sense that what’s happening is right, not in a moral way, but that there couldn’t be any other way for the story to go. It brings the reader to accept these strange people, to accept their strange ways.

As a journey through the underbelly of Finland, Dark Paradise does an interesting job of bringing voices to the disillusioned and unhinged, to the depressed and dependent, although some cases are extreme and stretch credulity. What Liksom does is somehow make these short portraits believable and, with the occasional epiphany thrown in, dliver stories that somehow linger long after they’ve ended, partly for their strangeness, partly because they could happen. If this is Liksom’s idea of paradise, then it belongs to the lost.

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.