The Burning Plain
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The Burning Plain, a collection of short stories, including the title story, by the Mexican author Juan Rulfo (1917–1986), published in 1953.
The rainless, infertile Llano Grande, or Great Plain, in the west-central Mexican state of Jalisco frames these tales about the Mexican Revolution and the Cristero Rebellion. “So much land, so immense, and all for nothing,” sighs one character, a sentiment that is echoed despairingly throughout the collection. Populated by revolutionaries, bandits, and people who cannot escape it, the “burning plain” is a kind of hell on earth, both literal and metaphorical.
Rulfo’s stories, like his sole novel Pedro Páramo (1955), center on the endlessly brutalized lives of the rural poor and the one escape that awaits them: death. The stories in The Burning Plain are about what has happened and what cannot be changed, about revolution and betrayal, about the corruption that political power brings and the weary willingness of ordinary people to accommodate it, knowing that they cannot do otherwise. Rulfo explores the mechanisms of dominance and the faces of violence, often within the framework of family relationships being torn apart. Most of Rulfo’s characters, without purpose, roam across the landscape as if already dead. Some are, in fact, already ghosts, and one might count them the fortunate ones.
With this collection of short stories, the then unknown Rulfo was recognized as a master. The skillful handling of temporal structure and narrative voices, together with the dexterous balance between reality and fantasy, remote from magical realism, and the great originality of these stories, have all led to their author’s being considered one of the leading Latin American writers of his time. The famed Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez cited Rulfo and William Faulkner as his two chief influences in writing his masterwork, One Hundred Years of Solitude.
The Burning Plain has been widely translated, three times into English, with the most recent translation appearing in 2024.