Few themes are sadder than the search for a father. In “The Odyssey” Telemachus cannot become a man until he tracks Odysseus down and receives his approval. Esau, tricked of his father’s deathbed blessing by Jacob, becomes even rougher and wilder than he already is. James Joyce, who knew something himself of the pain of this blessing, though his own father was all too present, sent Stephen Daedalus wandering the streets of Dublin with Leopold Bloom as his unlikely father figure. And in “Finnegans Wake,” he alluded yet again to the theme when he wrote about how Jacob “buttened a bland old Isaac,” the contrived verb suggesting both “buttering up” and “butting” as a way of conveying the combined shock and duplicity of the swindle. The son deprived of his father’s blessing becomes a kind of ghost. He lacks the gesture of validation that enables him not only to succeed his father but to become himse lf.

The ghostliness of the unacknowledged son has never been more painfully depicted than in the Mexican novelist Juan Rulfo’s masterpiece “Pedro Páramo,” translated by Margaret Sayers Peden (University of Texas Press, 154 pages, $35). Rulfo, a meticulous and enigmatic writer, produced little, but his work has had enormous impact. Gabriel García Márquez claims to have read “Pedro Páramo” so many times that he knows much of it by heart, and Rulfo is often credited with having inspired both “magic realism” and “El Boom,” the upsurge of Latin American writing that brought not only Mr. Márquez but Julio Cortázar, Álvaro Mutis, Miguel Ángel Asturias, and many others to international prominence. This may be true, but “Pedro Páramo” nevertheless stands in a category all its own.

Rulfo, born in 1918 in Jalisco, came to Mexico City as a teenager; he studied law at the university but never made a career of it, working instead at various odd professions (he was a tire salesman for a time) while quietly perfecting his art. He published a first collection of short stories in 1953 and two years later, “Pedro Páramo.” Though the two volumes made him instantly famous, he held aloof from the vociferous literary politics of his country. He once confessed that the novel had taken him many years, and many drafts, to complete; so stark is its effect that it seems to have been created by a process of pure deletion which nothing extraneous could survive. In economy of effect he has no rival but Borges; and as with Borges, the density of Rulfo’s prose has an epic dimension.

The story is simplicity itself, but, because it is disclosed in cunning fragments, the novel has a jagged momentum; past and present are conflated; the dead and the living mingle. It isn’t always clear whether a character is in fact alive or one of the loquacious shades who populate the deserted villages of the Mexican outback (indeed, the dead often seem more robust than the living). As she is dying, the narrator’s mother commands her son to seek out his father, a man named Pedro Páramo, whom he has never seen.The son is reluctant but slowly, he says,”I began to build a world around a hope,”and so he sets off for the distant village of Comala.

In Spanish “páramo” denotes a wild, deserted place empty of life, and this is the landscape where the son’s quest unfurls. Through abandoned villages, ruined fields, barren pastures the son wanders until he becomes incapable of distinguishing the few straggling survivors from the ghosts who mingle with them. Time itself contracts; the past and the present merge. As the son gets ever closer to his father, time connives in the quest.

He learns that his father has been dead for years. Pedro Páramo was a brutal man, a murderer and rapist with other unacknowledged sons roaming the countryside; he was a rapacious feudal lord, grabbing up property and evicting tenants. The more the son learns of the monster who begot him, the more the father begins to revive in his dreams and fantasies. But the ghost is as domineering as the living man had been, and as greedy. Bit by bit his story usurps the narrative and the son is supplanted.

This is a novel filled with voices, the whispered conversations of old women in shuttered rooms, the laconic exchanges of servants, the pithy wisecracks of the desperate, and crowds of echoes of vanished voices; what one character names “echoes of shadows.” Accompanying these voices like some ancient chorus are the sounds of the elements, bird-song and hot wind and the sudden squalls of rain in the dogdays. The beauty of the world has never been so achingly conveyed, perhaps because it seems so distant from those who witness it:

It was the hour of the day when in every little village children come out to play in the streets, filling the afternoon with their cries.The time when dark walls still reflect pale yellow sunlight … I’d seen the still air shattered by the flight of doves flapping their wings as if pulling themselves free of the day.They swooped and plummeted above the tile rooftops, while the children’s screams whirled and seemed to turn blue in the dusk sky.

The son finds his father in the end and is eclipsed by him; and yet, there is an eerie sense of redemption in the tale.The father is a monster but a tragic one; he is “one of the damned,” in the words of the village priest, who destroyed all that he might have loved. Pedro Páramo dreads memory for the way it cascades out uncontrollably, “as if a bulging sack of grain had burst and he was trying to keep the kernels from spilling out.” They do spill out, of course, and the lost son collects them, seed-grain by seed-grain. Only through memory can he cease to be a ghost.

eormsby@nysun.com