Pedro Páramo

I struggled with this one. The constant switching of timelines and narrators kept me perpetually off balance. I found myself wandering around this town of ghosts neither dazzled nor horrified, simply annoyed. Isn't there someplace I could just sit down for a moment without some ghost wandering over to tell me their life story? Perhaps I'm just like the critics of Juan Rulfo's time - puzzled and perhaps a little blind. The book sold poorly and Rulfo never wrote another book. In the ensuing years he would inspire Gabriel Garcia Marquez to write One Hundred Years of Solitude (Marquez said he could recite the book by heart) and become part of the Latin American canon. It just didn't work for me.