Astounding it was to encounter a writer who could do so much with less, painting pictures of the injustice within families and villages caught on a timeless land that was bleeding. The sheer power of Rulfo’s vivid poetic prose that made even cruel things beautiful within the shortest of stories that resonate with the textures and flavors of parched lands and cold mountain villages in the disloyalty of night.

The lyricism of the first pages arrested me, transporting me with the sensual perception of peasants caught between a beautiful yet unforgiving earth and the Mexican Revolution (1910-1917), and the Cristero War of the 1920s. So I was prepared to put the book at the end of the line of my reading list, but it seemed a shame to spend my time in Mexico not reading a local classic - especially such a measly book at less than 170 pages. Traumatized by my youth of force-fed books that contributed nothing to my life, I fervently preach how the books that make a difference find us we don’t choose them. It was a new edition of the short story collection El llano en llamas (The Burning Plains) in celebration of the 100th anniversary of Juan Rulfo. He frog-marched me into his university bookstore and bought me one of the few works of the renowned yet unprolific writer. And it was referring to Juan Rulfo and the history of such injustice that he brusquely encountered my lacuna regarding the iconic Mexican writer, which was sincerely surprising and inadmissible at he same time.

We also share a taste for walking the old streets of our beloved Puebla, Mexico, discussing the transformation of the city and a nation, as well as the a worrisome outlook for a Latin America where we live at two different ends, yet witnessing the same imbroglio of social, economic and political injustice across the region. But he is close family, and we share many tastes, including the great writers, Jorge Luís Borges and Gabriel García Márquez, who were so inspired by Rulfo. In another context, such an impertinent question that is actually not a question might arise out of the intellectual insecurity of other people’s taste. “❼ómo que nunca has leído Juan Rulfo?” asked my nephew and intellectual buddy, incredulous that I had never read one of Mexico’s - and Latin America’s - most iconic writers.

El llano en llamas by Juan Rulfo