Why it's so difficult to "get" Pedro Paramo on first reading

Though the narrative attains some clarity toward the end of Juan Rulfo's novel Pedro Paramo (1955) - the last third of the book or so focuses on PP's alliance of convenience with a group of armed rebels (one of the many revolutionary groups in Mexico in the early 20th century), his sexual abuse of many women who lived and worked on his estate in rural Mexico, his immoral and devious accumulation of wealth - does he remind us of anyone today? - and ultimately of his little-mourned death. Even so, this part of the novel is difficult to follow, with its many jumps in time and point of view that Rulfo indulges in w/out any attempt at transition or narrative guidance. Even more strangely, by the end we have completely lost touch w/ the establishing events in the novel, which begins with a young man pledging to his dying mother that he will travel to her homeland in search of his father, the eponymous PP. By the end, this young man - I can't even recall his name - is no longer part of the story, and PP is long deceased. All of this narrative experimentation was groundbreaking in the 1950s and feels, flowered across the globe - and especially in Latin America - in the 1960s, and today feels quaint and self-indulgent. The edition I read has a short forward by a deeply admiring Susan Sontag (patron saint of the impenetrable), which offers some insight: Apparently JR wrote this novel (his only published novel) over a long period of time, discarding much of his drafts as he went along in order to pare this novel to a bare minimum (it's only 124 pp); we can assume that he eliminated all of the transitions and back story that he considered irrelevant or unnecessary (I beg to differ), giving then novel at best a feeling of openness and velocity or at worst a feeling of confusion. That said, the writing is at times hypnotic and powerful, especially the accounts of death and of the fear of haunting and the surreal sections in which ghosts speak to one another. No doubt a second or third reading would bring more clarity, and more approbation, and maybe someday I'll come back to PP and see if a 2nd pass-through brings more light to the darkness - but not today.