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) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Brilliant evocation of el otro Mxico, "the other Mexico," by the writer whose inspiration underlies Gabriel Garca Mrquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.Rulfo, who died in 1986, is best known for his odd novel Pedro Pramo, in which ghosts and living beings share the streets of a dusty town out in the middle of nowhere that may or may not belong on this plane of existence. Qualities of that bardolike place are evident in this similarly odd tale of Dionisio Pinzn, a youngish man who sets out to make his fortune in the unpleasant but widespread "sport" of cockfighting. With the long-suffering Bernarda, "a tough and attractive woman with a flashy rebozo worn across her chest," he travels from town to town, off in the provinces away from the metropolis that, Rulfo suggests, Dionisio barely knows even exists. As he travels, Bernarda turns up at the oddest times; "her calling," his godfather tells Dionisio, who wonders where he's seen her before, "is to wander the earth, so it's not hard to have seen her just about anywhere." Though his golden cockerel falls in the ring in Jalisco, Bernarda brings him discipline and luck, eventually marrying him not out of love so much as loneliness. For his part, Dionisio, with his huge appetite for success, doesn't always treat her as well as he shouldbut winds up, in an ending quite reminiscent of Pedro Pramo, not to be able to live without her. With the novella are collected several sketches and other writings, most of which speak to Rulfo's preoccupations, chief among them death. "Death is immutable in space and time," one reads. "It's just death, without contradiction, not standing in contrast to absence or to presence." Even so, the narrator warns, it's bad form to make others weep when you go underground: "It's a rebuke that endures and that weighs on those who have died." A masterful storyteller whose dark view of the world isn't entirely cheerless or without humor and who deserves to be better known. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.