


Rulfo succeeds in this excellent story in capturing the sickly atmosphere surrounding the idiot boy, who is gnawed by hunger and filled with the terror of hell, and protected, and at the same time exploited, by his Godmother and the servant girl Felipa. In "Macario", the past and present mingle chaotically, and frequently the most startling associations of ideas are juxtaposed, strung together by conjunctions which help to paralyze the action and stop the flow of time in the present. Written like a monologue, where an orphaned town idiot named Macario describes in his flowing narrative a few of the special aspects of his everyday life. Le Clézio, who was the 2008 Nobel literature laureate, mentioned in his Nobel Lecture not only the writer Juan Rulfo, but also the short stories from El llano en llamas and the novel Pedro Páramo.

With a few bare phrases the author conveys a feeling for the bleak, harsh surroundings in which his people live. They explore the tragic lives of the area's inhabitants, who suffer from extreme poverty, family discord, and crime. The short stories in El llano en llamas are set in the harsh countryside of the Jalisco region where Rulfo was raised. A few stories, according to Schade, are scarcely more than anecdotes like "The Night They Left Him Alone". Schade describes some of the stories as long sustained interior monologues ("Macario", "We're very poor", "Talpa", "Remember"), while in other stories that may have otherwise been essentially monologues dialogues are inserted ("Luvina", "They have Given Us the Land" and ""Anacleto Morones"). In his introduction to the Texas edition, translator George D. (According to one reviewer, many of these stories are written in deceptively elemental language and narrative technique.)

and a gift for communicating what takes place internally and externally in man.an ear for the 'still sad music of humanity,'.has an eye for the depths of the human soul,.One review of these stories praises these seventeen tales of rural folk because they "prove Juan Rulfo to be one of the master storytellers of modern Mexico.". This collection and a novel entitled Pedro Páramo published within three years of each other in the 1950s established Rulfo's literary reputation. El llano en llamas (translated into English as The Burning Plain and Other Stories, The Plain in Flames, and El Llano in flames ) is a collection of short stories written in Spanish by Mexican author Juan Rulfo and first published in 1953.
