Have you ever heard the groaning of a soul? In “Pedro Páramo,” Mexican author Juan Rulfo’s haunting 1955 novel, these words strike the reader with unnerving force. But in the recent film adaptation, they drop clunkily onto a plot that lacks that same intensity. “Pedro Páramo” follows the story of Juan Preciado who, by the wishes of his late mother, travels to her hometown to visit his father, the titular character. Upon his arrival, though, he finds his father dead, the town decrepit, and the streets crawling with specters. The novel, often cited as defining the genre of magical realism, then shatters the chronology of the narrative and loosely reassembles its pieces to tell the story of how a licentious and concupiscent Pedro Páramo drove the town of Comala to ruin. It’s a novel that has never lent itself to easy readings—the plot is obscured by thickly layered euphemism and egregious understatement, and the narrative flits restlessly between different time periods and narrators. ...