Juan Rulfo helped invent magical realism. His ‘Pedro Páramo’ is now on Netflix.

“I came to Comala because I was told my father lived here” is one of the most famous first lines in Mexican literature. It comes from the 1955 novel “Pedro Páramo” by Juan Rulfo, an author who inspired Latin American writers such as Gabriel García Márquez. Now, the influential book has been adapted into a movie of the same name, which begins streaming on Netflix Nov. 6.

The character who voices those words is Juan Preciado, a man who travels to his late mother’s hometown to carry out a promise to find his father, Pedro Páramo, and claim from him the money and land that Juan is owed.

The book itself is relatively short at 150 pages. As the plot weaves between the living and the dead, the real and the unreal, it becomes “a novel that defies comprehension, with confusion and fragmentation becoming central to Rulfo’s unstable fictional world,” wrote Douglas Weatherford, who translated a new English edition of the book last year, in an afterword.

It’s that sense of confusion that director Rodrigo Prieto felt most challenged – and inspired – to preserve in his Netflix adaptation. “You can’t film the novel directly,” he has said, because it isn’t linear, and it combines the present with the past, where the living are the ones who disturb the dead. “The main challenge was to maintain the structural sense of Rulfo’s work.”

The bulk of the story is set during the Mexican Revolution, but the story is relevant today, says Emilio Sauri, associate professor of literature at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

“Pedro Páramo’s story is one about what happens in a world where there’s a major concentration of wealth in the hands of one individual,” says Dr. Sauri. “What are the consequences of that? In the novel, it’s destruction, desolation, complete annihilation of a social world.”

Mr. Rulfo, who lived from 1917 to 1986, said in a 1977 television interview that “Pedro Páramo” was meant to be read several times before it could be truly understood. “I also had problems writing it,” he said. “It’s a difficult novel, but it was made that way intentionally. You need to read it three times to understand it.”

The Mexican author, whose only other book is a collection of short stories, “El Llano en llamas,” (“The Burning Plain”), is known for his painstaking attention to language, which he used to paint vivid imagery with bare-bones sentences. His work is considered the opening act for the Latin American literature boom in the second half of the 20th century.

Like many Mexicans, Jacobo Leder first read “Pedro Páramo” in high school. Today, he’s a college student studying international affairs in Mexico City. “It was truly a huge disappointment for me when I realized he’d only written two novels,” Mr. Leder says.

He considers Mr. Rulfo, whose work has been translated into more than 30 languages, to be Mexico’s best author. Mr. Leder remembers a classroom assignment for which he had to map key locations in the book’s fictional town of Comala, which is both deeply anchored in Mexico and yet universal in its themes of hope, power, and loss.

“In the book, it’s really vague where all the physical locations are. ... It’s almost as if Comala is immense, infinite,” the entire world, Mr. Leder says.

Nobel Prize-winning author Mr. García Márquez wrote in a foreword to the book that when he first arrived in Mexico City in 1961, in his early 30s and looking for inspiration, he hadn’t even heard of Mr. Rulfo. “I felt I still had many novels in me, but I couldn’t conceive of a convincing and poetic way of writing them.” A friend lent him a copy of “Pedro Páramo,” and “I couldn’t sleep until I had read it twice. ... The rest of that year I couldn’t read a single other author, because they all seemed inferior,” he wrote. “My profound exploration of Juan Rulfo’s work was what finally showed me the way to continue with my writing.” Mr. García Márquez’s next work? “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”

There’s debate over whether Mr. Rulfo’s work should be categorized as magical realism, which incorporates elements of fantasy into otherwise real-world interactions. Are the dead speaking? Sure. Is there a multiplication of perspectives? Absolutely. But unlike in a lot of the genre’s classics, in “Pedro Páramo” there isn’t a strong juxtaposition between the real and the supernatural – it’s complete immersion.

Which is part of the reason the book can take some concentration.

Take for example a scene in which a woman named Damiana, who worked faithfully for Pedro Páramo despite how he oppressed so many people, comes to find Juan. She offers to take him to his father’s property. They walk together through an emptied-out town that she tells him “is full of echoes. It’s as if they were trapped in the gaps of the walls or beneath the cobblestones. As you walk, you feel someone following in your footsteps. You hear things rustling. Laughter. Old laughter, as if it were tired of laughing.”

She talks about hearing parties late at night, but when she comes down to see what is happening, the streets are deserted.

Juan asks her point-blank, “Are you alive, Damiana?”

The question goes unanswered.

In the movie adaptation, the uncertainty of this moment is underscored when Juan, who is following Damiana, pauses before rounding a corner after her.  As eerie music plays, he encounters only an empty, moonlit, cobblestone road. A dog barks in the distance, and Juan’s own voice reverberates as he calls out her name. Is his echo one of the sounds she’d been referring to?

Since Mr. Rulfo is cited as a key inspiration for contemporary Mexican novelists, why doesn’t he have the name recognition of other big Latin American writers? One reason could be that he wasn’t as prolific as his contemporaries, who are better known outside the region, says Dr. Sauri. 

And perhaps because of timing. Regional authors like Colombia’s Mr. García Márquez, Argentina’s Jorge Luis Borges, and Chile’s Isabel Allende “were finding the pathways to a broader audience outside the Spanish-speaking world. And Rulfo came right before that,” Dr. Sauri says. 

Mr. Leder, the college student, worries about whether the Netflix film will do the story justice. “I’ll watch the movie for nothing more than the fact that I think ‘Pedro Páramo’ is an incredible story,” he says. “Have I considered that I might like the movie more than the book? Definitely not.

“It’s unbeatable.”