[Mr. D.]

I'd like to suggest Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo. Marquez read it dozens of times before he started writing his 100 Years and he always acknowledged his great debt to Rulfo. Rulfo published a collection of short stories (The Burning Plain and Other Stories) and the above mentioned short novel (not a novella; the main character is too well developed for this to be a novella) in the early 1950s. After that he turned to photography but his influence has been great. He created the magical realism movement and so many Mexican and Latin American writers are in his debt.Pedro Paramo is the story of a man who goes to the town of his mother's birth to find his father, Pedro. When he gets there he finds decay and neglect. It's hard to tell which of the inhabitants are ghosts or still living persons. The dividing line has blurred so much.It has one of the best opening few sentences in literature. It goes: "I came to Comala because I had been told that my father, a man named Pedro Paramo, lived there. It was my mother who told me. And I promised her that after she died I would go to see him."There are very good English translation of his works available