Raising the Dead

O SINGLE WORK OF LITERATURE—PERHAPS NO SINGLE WORK OF ART—PERMEates the Mexican imagination like . While Juan Rulfo’s first and only novel did not make an immediate splash upon its publication in 1955, within a handful of years its reputation burgeoned, aided in part by its profound influence on a generation of writers from across Latin America, Gabriel García Márquez among them, who would collectively be credited with the development of magic realism. It also received plaudits from luminaries such as Jorge Luis Borges, whose stories, along with those of fellow Argentine authors Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo, could be regarded as precedents of the style. is both universal in its core themes and, in its particulars, a mirror is as entangled in the Mexican mythos as is in the American.