Pedro Páramo Netflix adapts the revered Mexican novel that inspired García Márquez

Many Mexicans know the first sentence of Juan Rulfo's revered novel, Pedro Páramo, by heart.

- Thomas Graham

I came to Comala because I was told that my father lived here, a certain Pedro Páramo.

This week they will hear it on Netflix, with the release of the first film adaptation in almost 50 years of the book that inspired Gabriel García Márquez to write One Hundred Years of Solitude.

"This country, where Death is written with a capital letter because it defines us in an inexorable way, at times brutal and at others poetic, has not found a more powerful metaphor than the story of Pedro Páramo," wrote the Mexican novelist Alma Delia Murillo in an ecstatic review of the new film.

The story is set in the decades around the Mexican revolution, more than 100 years ago, and those first words are uttered by Juan Preciado, who has travelled to the town of Comala to fulfil a promise to his dying mother that he would claim money owed to him by his father, who is a kind of feudal lord.